I’m sitting here on the floor at LAX waiting to check in my bags to go home. It’s a fitting end to a year where I haven’t been of any fixed address for more than four months at a time and have spent an absolutely incredible amount of time at airports, as well as bus and train stations…
2010 started in Jakarta on a sweaty night spent drinking with friends at a Kemang dive pub, then getting home on an ojek, darting through the small backstreets while people in the kampungs blew horns and let off fireworks. Then it went, if I recall correctly… Yogyakarta, Pangandaran, Jakarta, Denpasar, Kuta, Padangbai, Sanur, Ubud, Denpasar, Jakarta, Georgetown (Penang, Malaysia), Kuala Lumpur, Yogyakarta, Kaliurang, Yogyakarta, Solo, Surabaya, Probolinggo, Cemoro Lawang/Mt Bromo, Surabaya, Sidoarjo, Surabaya, Singapore, Batam, Medan, Tuk-Tuk (Lake Toba), Medan, Bukit Lawang, Banda Aceh, Pulau Weh/Sabang, Jakarta, Kuta, Melbourne, Albury, Sydney, Albury, Melbourne, Albury, Sydney, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York City, Washington DC, Phoenix AZ, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Washington DC, Los Angeles (where I am now…). Then I’m on a plane… Sydney… to Albury… then to Canberra in a week or so. So this is my third international move of the year, not counting the months of backpacking.
Yeesh. Part of me looks at that and goes “wow, what a year.” The other part looks at that and goes “I’m really tired and now I can kind of understand why.” Add three months of full time work in Jakarta at the start of the year, three months of freelancing on the road, a couple of months working at the family restaurant and freelancing, four months working part-time in the US while completing my first semester of graduate school in a discipline I haven’t studied before, an intensive language program in Yogyakarta, trying to teach myself macro and microeconomics… a lot has been crammed in.
It has been really great. I’ve seen some really amazing things and met some amazing people and I am super super thankful that I had the opportunity to do all of this cool stuff. But now I’m tired. And broke. So my resolution for 2011 is to roughly stay in the same place for at least a year. Sounds simple enough, right? That place will be Canberra… I’ve decided to transfer back to finish my master’s degree at the Australian National University (the reasons list is lengthy and complicated… those that know me in person can ask about it when they see me). I’m also resolving to keep up the good grades, and also to look after myself and to rebuild a bit financially etc after a crazy year.
But 2010 certainly won’t be forgotten in a hurry, that’s for sure.
So while I’m planning for a 2011 that is a little more sedate (but not toooooo sedate…), I wish everyone the best of luck for whatever adventure they have got planned for the year ahead.
Happy new year… or selamat tahun baru, if that’s more your style.
xxxx
Note: The picture up top is from a restaurant called “Bubba Shrimp” in New Orleans. It was a Forrest Gump themed restaurant… if you were fine and didn’t need service, you left the sign as “Run Forrest Run.” If you needed to catch the waitresses’ attention, you flipped it over to the “Stop Forrest Stop” sign.
Corner of Monroe and 14th NW… just down the road from me.
Today DC got its first real snow of the season… my yard was covered with about two inches of the white stuff. We’ve had flurries already, especially at night, but this time it actually accumulated a bit… which is exciting for me, as I have had very limited previous encounters with snow. A super light flurry in London, a trip to the snow fields as a very young child where we didn’t exactly see a lot… that’s about it.
The snow today was all powdery. The other night when we were walking back, it came with a bitter wind, but today thankfully not. I haven’t bought snow boots or a down coat, so I’m woefully underprepared, but since I’m leaving the country on Dec 31st, I’m going to try and make what I have last through the art of layering and/or staying inside when it’s really bad… plus I’m heading down to warmer climes for the next week or so to do some touristing anyway.
Besides adding a level of authenticity I’ve never seen before to Christmas kitsch, the snow also makes the ground icy and slippery. On my street the other day there was some black ice, so cars were skidding a lot.
A dude in baggy jeans and a puffy coat was standing there when I walked past the other day just laughing. “Dude, check this black ice shit out man!” he says to a passerby, just laughing away as another car spins its wheels on the ice after stopping at the red light. Usually, people might be a bit more concerned about the safety aspect of the black ice instead of the comedy aspect… someone must have complained, because the area was heavily salted when I walked past again later.
An IHOP (International House of Pancakes) opened in my DC neighbourhood of Columbia Heights, and I decided I’d better go and have an American Cultural Experience by eating there. It was pretty exciting. I had to wait for a table, so I got a card instructing me that they would call “Mo’Nique” when my table was ready. Instead of using my real name. It was slightly confusing. But a couple of minutes later they called it and I managed to realize they meant me and I plonked down in my diner seat.
This, dear friends, is the kind of American Cultural Experience that you get for $8. I just ordered the breakfast, but the pancakes and the free special apple “Fall flavours” crepe came with it. I did not expect to get all of this. But I think this is the American Dream. Lots of bad food for very little money. I kinda felt the breakfast was a healthier choice than the Cheesecake Pancakes or some of the chocolate options on the menu, but who really knows.
The pancakes were good. Everything else was meh. I ate about a third of this food then felt like I needed to puke and went home and napped. It’s pretty sad when you need to have a nap after breakfast.
So, the pancakes were good. But then I was tempted by the wrongness of it all and put the fluoro pink and blue fruit syrups they have on the table on to try, and that was scary. See on the crepe, those deceptive few slices of cinnamon apple? Well, I expected there would be more apple inside the crepe. But there was just more cream! Soooooo much cream! And it tasted like it was from a can.
I came to one conclusion from my trip to IHOP. If I was drunk, this would be the greatest thing in the world. But sober, not so much. Give me some fancy Melbourne or Sydney cafe breakfast any day…. where was the baby spinach? The sauteed rosemary portabello? The dukkah dusted eggs?
A homeless man asleep on the pavement on K St, or lobbyists row, where the powerful have the offices from where they campaign on the Hill. DC has many social problems such as poverty. If you go downtown on the weekend, the city’s parks are full of homeless people. They can’t sleep in the National Mall or around the monuments because they have such high levels of security and they get kicked out. But when the suits move out for the weekend, they crash in the little parks in between all the offices. It’s pretty sad to see, especially in these cold months. In a bus stop near campus the other night, one man had filled the stop with cardboard boxes and a shopping trolley of junk, and was sleeping there on the concrete wrapped up in multiple duvets. But it was so, so cold out.
One of the first things I noticed about DC when I arrived here were the cool metro stations. Brutal concrete structures, they have so many repeated patterns that any photog’s eyes are immediately pulled to them. They are pretty dark though, making it hard to get a clear shot without a tripod, but they are cool structures. The long deep bare concrete tunnels on the long escalator rides in and out of the stations are also pretty dramatic.
The cold stone waiting seats aren’t the most comfortable things though, especially in the cold weather, and especially when there is weekend trackwork and there is quite a wait for the next train.
It took me a while, but I finally got down to the Westernmost end of the National Mall this weekend to visit the Lincoln Memorial. And what a lovely sunny Fall day it was to go see it.
From the Lincoln Memorial, you also get a fantastic view of the rest of the mall, including the reflecting pond, the Washington Monument, right down to the Capitol Building.
So, are you all chanting “show me the Lincoln” already? OK, here he is.
I have to say, out of all of the monuments I have visited in DC so far, this one wins in terms of awe. Not only is it HUGE and a really architecturally powerful structure with a magnificent view, it represents so much more. The monument itself encompasses the ideal of unity that Lincoln advocated… the names of the states are carved around the top, and the visitors that come there to see it also show such a cross-section of American society. African Americans, Muslim Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, Americans with awesome thick accents from the south, Americans with organic granola bars and super tans from the West coast, Americans riding segways… the list goes on. All bound together by those grand narratives of the American ideals.
From my very poor knowledge of American history (correct me if I screw up), Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States and led the country through the civil war, managing to hold the states together, and ended slavery. He was also a fantastic speaker, providing many classic quotes on liberty, democracy and rights.
I saw an exhibition all about him at the Smithsonian Museum of American History a couple of months ago, and the story of his life is pretty impressive. A poor kid who grew up cutting wood in a log cabin in Kentucky, mostly self educated, he went all the way to President. The true American Dream, right?
The gaze on the sculpture is powerful. Staring right at the Capitol, right down the National Mall, which is fringed with buildings of knowledge and power, it’s like he is an eternal watchdog over the running of the country he helped collate.
When I was sitting up there with Mr President, admiring the view and pondering all kinds of things, I wondered how those at the Glen Beck rally, who preach nothing but division, could come to this place to vent their idiotic steam. Then I started wondering, does Lincoln’s face look angry? Proud? Concerned? Peeved because the tourists are loud?
What do you think?
It is generally accepted by all the middle class people I know that Georgetown is full of charming historic buildings and beautifully manicured streets, lovely restaurants, bars and cafes that we can’t really afford, yuppie chain stores, a good sprinkling of DC tourists… and pretentious wankers. Lots and lots of people with collarpopped Ralph Lauren polo shirts on. Lots of rich kids in Georgetown University athletic wear or J Crew talking obnoxiously about how their parents don’t give them enough money to spend on alcohol.
Sure, there’s probably a lot of nice people in Georgetown too, and I have met some Georgetown grad students who are very nice, so what I mentioned above are just the stereotypes… but stereotypes usually start somewhere, right?
So if you ignore the packs of 20-year-old males driving around in shiny SUVs screaming the word “Hoyas!” out the car window along with strange hand signals and thinly veiled loud misogynistic remarks about women on the sidewalk, Georgetown is a perfectly nice place to wander around for a couple of hours… just be careful the yuppies don’t scratch your arms with their pointy shopping bags.
It has some really pretty streets, especially if you wander back away from the retail strips and into the more residential part.
And if the frat boys get too much, at this time of the year there’s giant nutcrackers on the street to sort them out….
And if you run out of ideas for what to do, or get tired of walking, you can join the largely stationary line that goes around the block to try and get some small baked goods at the wildly popular “as seen on TV” Georgetown Cupcake.
Down on the banks of the Potomac River in DC’s Georgetown neighbourhood. The river divides the District of Columbia from Virginia… so across the river is a different state. Some of the DC landmarks along the river include the Lincoln Center and Georgetown University. The river has been in songs, poems… and the “old Potomac two-step” is just one of the many phrases used to describe the “dance” of political dealings in Washington.
The sun sets early now. On Friday, around 5pm, I had just finished another day in my dark, basement office in the depths of the campus biology building and was walking down toward the AU School of International Service (the school I attend) and I realized the sky was looking REALLY darn gorgeous. Lucky I had stuffed my camera in my handbag that morning after lamenting the fact that I hadn’t been shooting much lately.
