I haven't been to the US since 2000 January, so I've tried to make my schedule as packed as possible to maximize the visit. This turned out to be a disaster, since the overseas Delta flight from Dubai to Atlanta was 16 hours long, and I had trouble falling asleep, and ended up with serious jetlag for the first week.On the positive side, navigating around town has been surprisingly easy, and things are reassuringly the same. I got to the hotel from the airport, and then went sightseeing with Neena, and saw Capitol Hill.
The same afternoon, I got to Springfield, Virginia to see the Calins, my Romanian friends. Loredana has been a good friend ever since my freshman year in college, and it was great to just pick up from nine years ago.
Sunday morning, I met Melanie, my good friend from Bangladesh for Taste of Arlington food festival. The food was amazingly yummy, and Melanie was so well organized, we got a good discount online, which meant we ate even more food than we should have. Here's two of us holding great crabcakes that we took home.Sunday afternoon, our health team took a long bus ride to Easton, Maryland, which is, literally, in the middle of nowhere. It's a beautiful colonial town, with quaint signs like the one about good neighbor day, which is, I guess, June 1st.
Mary Beth, my colleague came up with a bunch of fun and games, and I participated in the whipped cream fear factor contest, where I had to find two bazooka gums, then blow a bubble. The gum was easy enough, but i could not blow a bubble to save my life. Our team, took home the bronze medal, which is not bad (there were three teams, btw, so it was pretty bad).I'm in Chicago now, which is my all time favorite city. I was surprised at how unchanged the city was, the same mural at the airport, very few new buildings (at least the ones I could see from the El train), the same relaxed atmosphere. There was this african american singer at the airport, who was singing a whitney houston song I never paid attention to before, "the greatest love of all, is happening to me". That's how I feel about this town, really.
