To celebrate my 25th and Simon’s 27th birthdays, we decided to get together with friends at a bar in the city. I’d been dying to go to this bar called McNasty’s, in the Adams Morgan neighborhood…
I called the bar and spoke to Tommy, who was the most chilled bar manager. He promised the upstairs room for free, and pretty much every drink was $3 (unheard-of on a Saturday night in the city), plus $10 pitchers of mixed drinks. And we could play our own music until DJ Bob showed up, and they set up beer pong for us.
No thinking necessary, we were in!
Adams Morgan is notorious for being the place to go for a night that you won’t remember. We didn’t go that far, but had a great time! It turns out that There was nothing really nasty about McNasty’s…a pleasant surprise.
Despite the rain, many friends came out and we made some new ones. Si’s new lumo trousers were a big hit, mostly with the trendy males.
We finished the night with a neighborhood tradition, the jumbo slice! Si said it was the best piece of pizza he’s had in America so far.
I’ve uploaded the trip photos to Facebook which leaves one thing – the videos.
Here’s my 2nd day on skis. It’s noteworthy more for Si’s camerawork than my skiing ability! I was concentrating so hard to go that slowly, and he was snowplowing along effortlessly.
Despite my 2:30am arrival Friday morning (due to major delays) and 7am wake up, we had an amazing first day here in Salt Lake City!
After breakfast and kit rental, we hopped on the city TRAX system – a great above-ground train, to a bus station to the south.
When we arrived, we realized we’d missed the bus to Snowbird, our intended destination. This turned out to be the best thing, as another was coming in 20 mins for Brighton resort! Phew!
We were helped by a girl called Char, from Tasmania. She just married an American guy and we shared many gripes about long distance international relationships and visas! Turns out she’s also done a bit of traveling, so we had lots to talk about. We swapped numbers and hopefully will continue the convo at a bar this evening with her hubby.
All of this transport is free with our 3 day ski pass, which was discounted! LivingSocial is our friend!
On to the resort, where we had great conditions! We heard that this year the snow is the worst it’s been in the past 15 years, but Si found it better than France, and the East Coast of the US can’t compare! Everyone on the slopes was happy and friendly, there were hardly any lines, and it was a perfectly warm and sunny day.
Today looks to be similarly beautiful and we are off to Alta to ski – my first time! No boards allowed there. Fingers crossed…
Although we were knackered when we returned to the hotel, we toughened up and roamed around downtown SLC in search of dinner. Everything was unbelievably crowded! We settled at a brew-pub called Red Rock and had a delicious supper. We returned to the room for an amazing full night of sleep.
I’m writing this from the train to Baltimore, where I will catch my flight to Salt Lake City. I spotted a familiar sight – my office building (the one on the left in the picture). Feels so good to be leaving it until March 19th!!! Check you on the slopes!
After arriving back in Washington DC last thursday, Christina whisked me off to the mountains of Maryland and West Virginia for a long weekend away with friends – the Monday was a public holiday. I wasn’t sure about the idea of travelling so soon again after having just spend 18hrs in airplanes and another 11 in airports en route back to the States. ‘Chin up!’ I was told, ‘Sounds like a personal problem!’
We had been invited to stay out at a friends lake house on Friday and Saturday night, and planned then to join our housemate and another gang on the Sunday for a jol half an hour away in another valley. All set we booked out!
Friday night was a mad rage – jaeger and Monster came out to play and so did we! Necking red wine 5mins before passing out was a mistake. The next morning proved that! But still, nothing quite beats playing Yankee ping pong ball drinking games with light beer in a basement – the combination always seems to lead to some type of debauchery!
The following day you were more likely to have seen a Sudanese Toposa on the slopes of Wisp resort than any of us! I have provided an image in case your imagination can not fathom that possibility!
In case you were wondering, this is what a lost Toposa woman looks like
None the less we did still venture out of the house. By ‘out of the house’ what I really mean is that we took about 35 steps and upon finding ourselves at the edge of the frozen lake, decided to end our exploration of Deep Creek Lake. After failing to break the ice with a consistent bombardment of arm propelled rock projectiles, we took a few photos and made our way back to to comfort and security of the house. With the door closed shut, we promptly resumed our vegetative positions on the couch and rejoined the action and excitement of ‘My Cat from Hell’ with none other than Jackson Galaxy – the cat whisperer. An amazing example of American television!
The Lake House Gang: Christina, Rob, Gordie, Simon, Tarik, Amanda and Chris
I think Christina is laughing here because she had just done a sneaky little fart out on the rock!!
I had to test the ice!
No one wanted to play with me...
Random electricity supply in the middle of the woods - I was unaware that this photo was being taken!
The following day Christina and I left the man cave and headed for West Virginia. Ironically, our housemate’s cabin is less than a mile from the place we stayed for New Years – so need less to say, we knew how to get there! That afternoon saw us heading to one of the two local ski resorts, called Timberline, to do some shredding with Lozza and Kira.
The white carpet - not much snow has fallen this season, but lately temperatures have been cold enough for the fake snow to last quite a long time.
The skiing conditions were far better than what we experienced over New Year’s, but still didn’t quite compare to a run off the top of Saulire! Christina did a great job of keeping it upright, as demonstrated in the video below…
The paparazzi also caught some guy in red pants and a Fiddy jacket ripping up the slopes…
That night we went back to Lauren’s cozy cabin and proceeded to waste 2 hrs of our lives. This sad reality dawned on us after watching the movie, ‘Terms of Endearment’ – a word of warning, do not press play if this dvd is in the machine and your finger is hovering over the play button. To add injury to insult, half way through the Academy Award winning film Christina kindly poured a fair amount of her boiling hot apple cider juice stuff on me. Maybe the fact that I asked her to please not spill her drink on me encouraged her to ‘lose control’ of the liquid receptacle. Not to worry, I was once again told ‘chin up!’, and life went on…. The night was saved by Kira when she brought out the Monopoly board – that resulted in two hours of innocent fun!
So I’m off to California on March 2nd for NRECA’s Annual Meeting, then Christina is flying out on the 8th and we’re going to spend two weeks jolling on the West Coast. Two days after returning from that trip, I’m set to head down to Haiti for a month. So it’s going to be a busy lead up to our birthdays in late’ish April – lots to do and see.
I was in sleepy Shepherdstown, West Virginia last week for a government-only training on leadership. It was amazing! I met some truly incredible people and was inspired by their commitment to public service.
The main street (read: only street) of Shepherdstown, WV!
I got useful career advice too!
Daily activities included playing with blocks, drawing, receiving gifts, and building towers out of construction paper. Not to worry though taxpayers, we also did less fun things like oral presentations and written briefs.
There was no time for rest in the evenings – I took Zumba and yoga classes, hit up trivia night and karaoke in the hotel bar, and went out on the town for a nice dinner (which we mised – $160 bill cut down to $70)!
Travis and Neisy constructing our "tower of love"
It was great to get out of the hecticness of the office for a week. Will be hard to get back into it tomorrow morning!
I snapped this on my way to tutoring last week. It’s McPherson Square in DC, which was one of the two locations of the Occupy DC protest. These guys were evicted by SWAT teams and riot police on Friday…one of the last occupy protests in the country to be evicted. It’s for the best – there was a definite stench emanating from the square, people (even tourists) were getting heckled on a regular basis, and the park is now in ruins!
In the late afternoon and early evening there’s a constant procession of women and young girls cruising up and down the one side of our compound. They’re all on their way to the river to fetch water for the evening’s cooking and washing. They cruise down the slope swinging their yellow jerry cans, and a few minutes later they’re elegantly hurrying back up in the opposite direction – jerry can precariously balancing up on their heads!
Two boys and a girl posed very politely for Bob here - they carry water from a young age... It's surprising to see a boy with the water on his head, they usually carry the containers in their hands.
After a week watching the flow of traffic going backwards and forwards, Abud accompanied Bob, Victor and me down to the river to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out there’s a natural spring coming up under the base of a massive mango tree just on the river bank near the reeds, and that’s where they draw their water from. As expected we found a couple of young women filling up their jerry cans, all with big smiles on their faces!
Filling up from under the tree... cleaning their feet at the same time! How's that Casio!
I’ve attempted a few times in the past to try and carry things on my head, usually with little success! Feeling the need to try and improve on my past attempts, I asked one of the girls if I could have a go trying to balance a jerry can on my head. She and her friends gave me an unsure look that kinda said “A Khawaja (white person) has never been down to the spring before, let alone asked to carry water on his head! What now?” Abud quickly rattled something off in Arabic – the result was an eruption of laughter and the next thing I knew a piece of cloth was being prepared in a ring/doylie for me to use as a cushion under the container on my head. Suddenly it was my turn to have a look on my face that said, “Now what?”
"Hi, I'm Simon! Can I try and carry that water container on my head?" Before I knew it, a doylie was under construction by the girl, here, in the dark shirt!
At this point Bob and Victor were all smiles – they didn’t for a second think I had what it takes! Neither did I for that matter! So with the help of the girl in the light shirt, we hoisted a 20L jerry can up and plonked it on top of the doylie on my head. My body tensed instantly as it realised that a massive weight was now acting directly down my spine! After my knees had stopped wobbling and with both hands firmly gripping the container, I decided to take my first steps. Turns out it’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks!
The doylie slipped off and unravelled on my first attempt! Rookie!
"Steady on old chap!" Maybe he didn't use those exact words, but Abud came over and added his 2cents none the less.
I proceeded to fumble around the small area with absolutely no control over the container resting on my head. Initially I didn’t dare try to take my hands off, not even one at a time! My route was totally dictated by the direction in which the water swished around inside the jerry can – that’s what makes it so hard! One has to constantly adapt to counter the dynamic nature of the water. I began to worry that the girls might die of laughter, so I humbly handed over the jerry can and turned to face the heckling from Bob and Victor! Before handing over though, I got Bob to count down and take a photo. As he opened the shutter, I quickly took both my hands off the container and hoped like hell the jerry can stayed up long enough to save me from embarassment. Upon returning home and checking the photo out, we all decided it couldn’t have turned out better – I look like a pro! If only….
This photo doesn't quite capture the randomness of my wandering...And there you have it, no hands! Wooooooaaah! The girl next to me was a real pro - she could balance that container of hers indefintely - I wish she could see me wheelie a bike!
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