VOTE FOR ME!!

Ridiculous, I know... Who nominated me for this thing?!

24 hours later...

... we're all safe and sound back in our rooms at Georgetown Law. We got back around 3, and people went straight to bed and haven't woken up since.

Click here to read the "official" story.

flooding and being held captive in the law library

So right now, I'm in the Georgetown Law Library and it's 2 AM. We were evacuated from our dorm a few feet away around 11:15 PM because the generator room in the basement apparently had flooded and the staff were concerned that the combination of electricity and water would cause the building to explode. Yes. Explode.

So we're just hanging out now... some people have attempted to sleep, others are playing hide-and-seek, and a few escaped and went to the Dubliner for some sustinence (aka alcohol). The latter group has now returned and they're drunk. The rest of us are jealous.

Apparently, pizza is on the way. The metro is flooded and there was a fire on the red line somewhere near Dupont Circle. It's a two hour wait for cabs. (Cabs aren't out but pizza delivery people are?) Someone has already mentioned "The Lord of the Flies." If the pizza takes much longer, we'll probably have to eat the loud people that are keeping us from sleeping.

We heard a big bang a while ago. It was probably thunder. Or the dorm exploding. Whatever.

People are saying the metro, and therefore the city, will be shut down tomorrow. The power is out all over DC and the flooding has affected more areas than the outage has.

Of course, when they told us to get out, we thought it was a fire drill or something, and I only brought my room key and my GOCard, the Georgetown Student ID. If I had my cell phone, I could have called any one of the hundreds of friends I have in DC to come pick me up and I could totally have stayed at their place.

At least this is Georgetown LAW. If anything happens, we're convincing all these lawyers-to-be to totally bring a suit against the University.

Send food. And pillows.

bobbleheads, mojitos and NYC

We pack so much into the weekends, they each seem to be at least a week long.

After a fabulous homemade breakfast of moondogs, eggs and toast, a big group of us went to the Nationals v. Phillies game on Saturday, June 10 - which was also BOBBLEHEAD day!! Apparently, we didn't get the vouchers we needed to pick up a free bobblehead of Chad Cordero, the Nationals' closer, so we spent the majority of the game trying different ways to get one of the bobblehead dolls. Eventually, during one of the last innings, a friend and I went up to the place where they had been giving them out. They were packing away the extras and putting them back in storage. I went up to the guy who seemed to be in charge of the operation and I started to explain our situation. He tried to turn us away, to which I replied, "Well, the thing is..." He faced us and with a big sigh, he said, "hold on," picked two of the bobbleheads up and gave them to us.

The night before, a few of us ventured to Cafe Citron in Dupont Circle, my favorite bar in DC. After dancing on the tables - the norm in this amazing Brazilian bar - chatting with the wonderfully gay, tight-jeans-clad, fiftyish gentleman on the table next to ours, and enjoying mojito after mojito, we left feeling very happy and knowing it was only one of many amazing DC nights to come.

Last Friday around 8 PM, I ran into Miss Lindsey Mischka on the metro on the way to meet up with Tomek and some of his buddies. Lindsey informed me that she was leaving for New York City at 8 AM on Saturday and asked me if I wanted to come. I agreed on the spot and after getting home very late and sleeping for two hours, we were on the Chinatown bus to NYC with three of our friends. Five hours later, we arrived in the much smellier and much larger Chinatown in New York. We visited Little Italy (during the Italy v. USA game), Ground Zero (very emotional), Times Square (sensory overload), the MoMA (the educational component), and met a former member of MTV's Real World - Boston who is now a Georgetown Law Student and wants to party with us in DC.

I realize I've been posting mostly about the weekends. I will do a write-up of a day in the life of a Kennedy Press Intern soon (including the many John Kerry and McCain sightings each week).

On another note, the ARGENTINA v. Germany game is this Friday at 11 am. Probably our most challenging match yet. My money is still on Argentina v. Brazil in the final. :)

walking, walking and more walking

I definitely made my first weekend in DC this summer a good one.

Friday night, after work, I went with some Kennedy Judiciary interns and staff to see Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." In the movie, Al Gore presents many facts, charts and graphs that all lead to the inevitable conclusion that in the past few years, global warming has grown exponentially higher than it did for the rest of
human existence. I learned a ton. At the end of the movie, words float up on the screen asking what the audience can do and providing solutions. I was motivated and stunned by the drastic nature of the problem and the immediacy with which we need to act. I would recommend seeing the movie when it comes to your area. After the movie, we had dinner at a Thai place in Georgetown and then walked to Dupont Circle and went home. When I got back to the apartment around midnight, the two 21-year-olds that were here, Aaron and Sarah, both wanted to go out, so we went to a little irish pub about a block away. All in all, a fun and relaxing evening!

Saturday, I wanted to go back to the Hirshorn museum, the Smithsonian's modern art museum, so another guy in the program, Justin, and I went. We ended up walking all the way down the mall (about three miles), through the Hirshorn and the American History museum, to the White House, past George Washington University, to Dupont Circle, and down Embassy Row. We basically walked all over the NW quadrant of the city in about six hours!

On our way to the White house, we came across a plaza where a bunch of boys were skateboarding. There were a bunch of black squares in the stone on the plaza and although I had passed it before, I had no idea what it was. We stood on the expanse of stone and began to look around. It turns out it was a replica of Washington the way L'Enfant had intended it to look. You could see all the streets laid out in the pattern, with Pennsylvania Avenue and the federal buildings all highlighted and labeled. Further down, there were quotes from people like John F. Kennedy, Charles Dickens and Martin Luther King, Jr. about the city. It was gorgeous and it made me realize how much I missed during my first semester living in DC. There's always more to see!

On Sunday, I decided to be a tour guide for the other people in my program that had arrived. I took four of them to Whitlow's on Wilson - WOW - in Clarendon for brunch, then we made it to Georgetown and strolled through the streets on the riverfront and through the university all day. It was one of the best afternoons I have spent in Georgetown yet. The weather was beautiful and everyone was in a great mood. When we eventually made it home, everyone was exhausted from all that walking and after long naps, we all decided to do some reading for our class on Tuesday.

It is now Monday morning at around 11 PM, and I work from 2 PM to 8 PM today. Mom and Dad just got home from visiting Annika in Brazil today, and it was so good to hear from them. I hope everyone in Madison is having a great summer. With any luck, I'll be posting more regularly this time around, so check back often!

settling in

I arrived in DC on Tuesday after a pleasant flight and very few complications. My "dorm" is on the Georgetown Law School campus, which is located on Capitol Hill and not near the rest of the Georgetown campus. I can see the top of the Washington Monument from my window!! The location of our apartment is pretty amazing - I'm two blocks from Union Station (a metro stop, and combination of a mall, movie theater and restaurants), and I'm about three blocks from the Russell Senate building, where I work. There are also several Irish pubs and great restaurants all around.

Work started on Wednesday. The Senate wasn't in session last week, so things were slow. Working as a press intern is very different from being a regular office intern. Our hours are long, from about 8 AM to 8 PM, although now we have shifts and only have to work about six hours a day with one 12 hour day thrown in per week. We have our own office, only take calls from reporters (so no crazy constituents to deal with), and our staff is generally relaxed but very focused. Overall, I am really looking forward to seeing how our office works under pressure when the Senate is in session. There are five other interns, all female, and we all get along pretty well. This is a good summer internship and I am interested to see how my duties and the office develops.