November 4, 2006
Last weekend we went down to Alexandria to help Irene move to her new apartment. It's not at all far from her old one, a whopping 8 minutes, according to google maps, and she doesn't have a lot of furniture, so the move itself went relatively well. However, it may be the last time I help a book lover move apartments without an elevator. David, in an effort to streamline the process, had us each in a "zone" so we handed stuff off to the person in the next "zone" rather like a bucket-line to put out fires, and I ended up on the stairs for a majority of the time. And book boxes are never small! Ooof.
Sunday, though, we had some free time in the morning before I had to start working on a literature review due Thursday, so we went into Georgetown. (I say this as though it wasn't demanded by me, but actually I really wanted to go to Patagonia. I love their pants!) Irene had mentioned offhandedly that we would have to take the metro from a different stop, since the nearest one, Crystal City, was close because of the Marine Corps Marathon, but we were all unprepared for the fact that the race crossed into D.C., meaning the bus into Georgetown from our last metro station wasn't running. We ended up walking, since it's not all that far, and we got to walk alongside the race, which was lots of fun. We came across one of the Marine bands playing YMCA, which we all found hilarious, given the original group to make the song famous; saw one of the runners talking on her cell phone (in fairness, she was towards the end of the pack); and I was enlightened as to how much littering goes on during a race. It's shocking! Not just the paper cups at the water stations, which get swept up, but the clothes! There were shirts and gloves and hats scattered all along the route. Such a pity. At any rate, we had fun watching, David took lots of pictures, and I got to go to Patagonia, so it was a fine morning.
In Irene's never ending determination to make us watch as many Hindi films as possible, she and David were supposed to go see Don while I worked on my paper. Given the activity of the day before, though, they were too bushed to sit through the three hours, so we all ended up at a Barnes and Noble, instead. But fear not, we've been committed to watching a "curry western" from beginning to end in one sitting over Thanksgiving, so we'll get our Bollywood fix in yet.
