...and it is just hitting me that in four months I'll be moving halfway around the world. I am spending today making lists of things I gotta get done and staring at the calendar. I've been in Tamil language training for the past three weeks and have seven more left. After many Sesame Street-esque days I can now recognize the alphabet and sound out words...although I rarely know what the words mean...it still just seems like a bunch of random sounds.
I've had a lot of visitors lately and have gotten to see some new and interesting parts of D.C. A few weekends ago I had some people over for dinner and then me and one of the gals went out salsa dancing...Cafe Havana has three floors, the top two are wooden floored crowded hot sweaty places pulsing with latin music...and men...so many men. I wanted to get my bearings and decided to try to go to bathroom after the floor was decided...three guys tried to make me dance on way to bathroom. Seriously was the kind of place where you could not possibly stand alone for a minute without someone trying to make you dance....so dance I did...it was a lot of spinny spinny crazy arms around the head and spinny spinny some more. Seeing the line of well-dressed latin men along the wall I couldn't help thinking of Anthony Bourdain and wondering if when all the line cooks get off work do they instinctively know to just get dressed up and come to this place? It was nuts.
Last night I went to a place called Dan's Cafe. This was a true dive. Not only was there no lock on the bathroom door but the little waiting area between bar and closet with toilet had a wall of multi-colored chewing gum to complement the very interesting grafitti. I ordered a vodka cranberry at the bar. I was given a bucket of ice, a fifth of vodka poured into one glass, a 16-ounce plastic bottle of cranberry juice and an empty glass....the place is almost self serve...now this ensemble only cost $12 so no real complaints here...well maybe a complaint about the loud jukebox which happened to play sweet home alabama and pour some sugar on me TWICE...EACH...but never quite got to my friend Joan's friend's selections...which was apparently 16 songs in a row of Paula Abdul....hmm maybe I shouldn't complain?
