With Mary
This was a great week for seeing good friends. The highlight of our week was getting to see Mary, who was in DC for work. We met her for dinner at Harry’s on Tuesday night – great to catch up!
Thursday night, we were back at Harry’s to celebrate the upcoming wedding of two of our A-100 classmates, Sarah and Aaron. They will be the second couple from our class to get married (and there will be a third in December). We went with them on their first date back in 2007, so I feel somewhat invested in their future!
This week was also the 3rd anniversary of joining the Foreign Service. We had an A-100 happy hour on Friday night to celebrate. We were at a rooftop bar on a beautiful warm evening – a perfect way to celebrate. Click for photos from happy hour.
On Thursday, the Hebrew classes drove to Maryland for lunch at a local kosher restaurant. The food was great – John and I had a salad made from shawarma – delicious! After lunch, we each made a mini-presentation about something in Israel. Although it still sounds like baby talk to me, we are making progress. I talked about wine and John talked about cheese from Israel. Click for photos from lunch.
Last Sunday, my friend Cathy and I drove to CostCo – she is moving to Africa and can ship consumables, so we were stocking her up. Afterwards, we had lunch at the Stray Cat Cafe, a little place not far from our apartment. The whole place is decorated with pictures and paintings of cats, and a portion of their proceeds goes to animal rescue. My kind of place.
Yesterday, I metro’d to Clarendon for lunch with my friends Jimmi and Ashley (Jimmi was in our A-100 and I was in Spanish class with Ashley.) We sat outside to enjoy the nice weather and compared our last posts (all of us were in Mexico) and talk about Ashley’s upcoming wedding.
John and I watched a fun movie last night, Pirate Radio, with Phillip Seymour Hoffman – fun, and a great soundtrack.
In Area Studies this week, we had a great speaker, the new Ambassador to Syria, who spoke about his time in Iraq. And we attended an early morning speaker series where we listened to an FSO who is currently an Iraq advisor to VP Biden – both interesting talks. Do I really get paid for this?
With our Hebrew class and teachers
With Dean at the rooftop happy hour