Dupont Circle

This evening after dinner, I went out to go and get some things at the drugstore and an item or two that I had forgotten to get at the supermarket earlier. It was warm and humid, as usual, but two big thunder showers in the afternoon had brought down the temperature a few degrees, and it seemed as if everyone had emerged from their air-conditioning to enjoy the sultry evening.

The women here really know how to dress up. They wear beautiful, stylish clothes and are extremely well-groomed. But it's the clothes that are such a pleasure to see. Dutch women dress pretty much the same all the time: even when they go to the opera, it's the same semi-casual uniform all the time, with very little distinction between daywear and evening (save perhaps the odd accessory). Perhaps it has to do with the weather, which is seldom warm enough to wear stylish shift dresses, or perhaps it has to do with the cycling (ever tried cycling in a tight skirt?), but there's less evidence of making an effort. Here, there is a clear distinction between daywear and evening wear: when you travel on the metro between 5 and 7 in the evening, you can definitely tell the difference between the day crowd on their way home from work in their smart tailored trousers and shirts, and the evening crowd, with their high heels and sparkle.

Another pleasant surprise here has been shops' long opening hours. Our supermarket up the road is open from 5am to 10pm, and the drugstore (CVS) is even open 24 hours a day. I understand that this is because of the labour laws being less strict (people can work as many hours as they want to), but it does make for tremendous convenience to customers. I remember the times I planned to be back in Delft from Rotterdam by 6 in order to do something in the shops (other than the supermarket), and would be just too late, or when I was early, the blissful realisation that I had ten minutes to quickly browse in a shoe shop on the way home before they closed at 6. Here it's just so much easier.

The third thing that has really impressed me here, is the level of service. If something isn't right, the shop will mostly take it back or exchange it, no questions asked. Yesterday, I went to Staples, a big stationery and office supplies shop like Waltons in South Africa, and bought a stapler. As I was unfamiliar with the various brands, I just took the cheapest one. As a bonus, it also came with a staple remover and a box of spare staples. Well, it turns out you always get what you pay for, because the first thing that happened when I opened it to put staples in it last night, was that a long spring detached itself at one end. We tried to find a place to reattach it, but the end result was us having to sort of stuff it back in to close the thing, because it made a big, loose arch instead of pushing the staples forward. I went back today with the intention of just asking for a refund, but the guy said I could exchange it for a stapler of a better brand - without having to pay in extra. I was very impressed, to say the least!

Today was a very productive day, as I sent off all the documentation needed for my work permit application. I'm doing it through a company called VisaVersa back in the Netherlands. They gave us so much (free) advice when we were trying to decide which kind of visa to get, I decided it would only be fair to make use of their services. It's going to be pricey, but the money will quickly be earned back if the application is approved.

I'm also practising cello most days now. I want to audition for an orchestra here called the Capital City Symphony (www.capitalcitysymphony.org), and it sounds as if the standard is pretty high, with some professionals playing in it too. The audition is on the 26th of August, and I've already got a pretty good idea of what I'm going to play. Besides the audition, though, it's really nice to have the time to pick up my cello again and work on some lasting technique issues. It gives me a sense of achievement at a time when my life has very little structure.

The other thing I've been working on has been an article for a friend of a friend who is a lecturer in Theology at an evangelical theological seminary in Leuven. It will be hard-going, but then you need something difficult to help you appreciate your leisure time :-P

The solitude and lack of structure is starting to get to me a bit. Today when I emerged from the metro station at Dupont Circle and saw the flower seller standing there, I thought oh! I should buy flowers! And bought flowers to take to the barbecure we're going to... tomorrow...

I'm starting to miss my friends a lot, but I try not to think about it too much. I'm also realising that spending lots of time on Facebook only partly makes up for it. Now comes the crunch... But I know that it will get better. I just need to be patient and trust God to send the right people across our paths...

x

The Hunt

Dear friends and family,

A long-overdue update! The last week has been a busy one, and largely dominated by our search for an unfurnished apartment to move to once our month of furnished luxury ends but we also did something fun. Every Monday evening, there is an outdoor screening of a film on 'the Mall' - a large open park area that extends between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial (perhaps you will recognize it from images of Obama's inauguration). It is lined by museums belonging to the Smithsonian Institute, including the National Air and Space Museum and the National Art Gallery. The event is called 'Screen on the Green', and people bring picnic blankets and park off on the grass to watch the film. It was a very hot evening: hot and humid. The closest I could find to a picnic blanket at Target was a yoga mat, so we perched on this rather narrow strip and had our picnic. The atmosphere was wonderful. We saw a beautiful glowing sunset behind the Washington Monument, and at one point there was a brief rainshower (we sheltered under my umbrella). The film was so-so: "The Goodbye Girl", written by Neil Simon. At one point they must have loaded the wrong reel, because suddely an earlier scene was repeated. We never got to see the end, as we left soon afterwards, but it was fun nonetheless!

[What follows is a fairly detailed account of our house search. The short version is: we've found a cool place to live :-)]

The search started slowly with my foray into Craigslist that led to that one viewing in Takoma Park, then culminated in me frantically working through lists of apartment blocks. But we'll get to that!

On the way home from church the Sunday before last, we happened to notice one of the many containers with newspapers and advertising periodicals that seem to feature on every street corner here contained some copies of a monthly publication called 'Apartment Showcase'. It's about 5 cm thick and turned out to be one of the most comprehensive overviews of what's available for rent in DC. There were at least 15 blocks listed with one-bedroomed apartments in our price class (we gave up on the two-bedroomed thing long ago). I diligently drew up a list of them, with addresses and contact numbers.

(This is what they looked like in winter with snow on them! - Taken in December)

Then started the vetting process.

Were they close to a metro station? What facilities did they have? (Dishwasher, gym, laundry...) And if they met the criteria for location and facilities, did they have a one-bedroomed apartment in our price range available? Many didn't, and somewhere along the line, I discovered the website http://www.apartmentratings.com/, where tenants past and present rate various different apartment blocks. After that, I started looking up the blocks not only on the map, but also on there, which narrowed down the possibilities quite dramatically. The thing with D.C. (or 'The District', as the locals call it), is that many of the cheaper apartment blocks are old and in need of some renewal. D.C. is also a city where many people live in a relatively small area in a temperate climate, so you're going to get some vermin. The problem was that many of the promising apartment blocks turned out to be overrun with cockroaches and/or mice, and some tenants mentioned problems with bedbugs (!). The problem was not necessarily the presence of these pests, as the lackadaisical attitude that the building management had when it came to dealing with them. If a building had review after review that said the place was overrun with cockroaches and that management didn't seem too concerned to do anything about it, it got struck off my list. Likewise places with lots of students. (Although I'm not comparing students to cockroaches, of course!)

After this intensive sifting process, I managed to make two appointments for viewings: one on Wednesday evening, and one on Friday morning. The Wednesday evening apartment had a lot going for it: it was 'downtown', i.e. in the centre of the city, two minutes from a metro station, 10 minutes from Chinatown (where there are a lot of restaurants and things), it was newly renovated (albeit with cream wall-to-wall carpeting - not very practical!), it was in a small block (3 storeys), it had a balcony and a dishwasher, and the laundry was just across the hallway. And there is a fantastic supermarket 5 minutes' walk down the road, they had a deal with the local gym that tenants could join for $25 a month, it had a free parking space (a rarity in DC!) and the rent was cheap: $1414 a month + electricity. The area seemed slightly shady, but when we went back at 10 o'clock at night, it looked quite okay.

In the meantime, a rental agency who I had emailed at the weekend finally got back to me. Enter Capri, the bubbly agent form Urban Igloo! They are the only agency in DC that deals solely with rentals (as opposed to both property sales and rentals), and their service to renters is free of charge. They didn't have much to show me, as this is the busiest time of the year (many people seem to plan moves for the summer), but they did have one up in Adams Morgan... This turned out to be the one I had an appointment to view on the Friday morning. Capri picked me up (this is the other perk: they drive you around!) in her old black Merc on Thursday evening to go and have a look at some apartments, and we saw a larger, more expensive one in the same block, and I was rather underwhelmed. I still preferred the other. On the Friday, however. Capri took me up there again, and I saw the actual apartment (they had been fixing it up until then), and that was enough to make me very confused. This was on a lower floor (the 3rd), overlooking a garden, so you don't feel as if you're in a big block at all. And although it didn't have a dishwasher, it had a bigger kitchen than the one I had seen previously. And loads of space. Other perks: a roof deck with views of all the major landmarks in the city, a gym in the basement and a very good supermarket next door, plus the fact that it's in a lovely area (embassies of Poland and Lithuania just a few doors down, park across the road) and that John F. Kennedy lived there as a young, up-and-coming politician.

We saw the apartment together on Saturday, and we were sold. This one doesn't have the parking space, it's further from a metro station (10-15 mins' walk), the laundry is in the basement and the rent is more expensive, but we decided the other one is a bit TOO much in the middle of everything, and that we preferred something a bit quieter. Our book for newcomers to DC describes the apartment blocks in Adams Morgan (that area of DC) as being like an old cadillac with the seats patched with duct tape: they may have seen better days, but the definitely have character! This is certainly the case with this apartment: the fixtures are (to put it kindly) retro, but they are well-maintained. And the parquet floors are gorgeous.

Today I handed in all the paperwork and paid the 'management fee'. We will be signing the lease contract sometime next week and moving on Sunday the 8th. Here are a few photos:

The living room Dining room area Kitchen (in-between living room, left, and dining area, right)

Bathroom, linen closet, bedroom The GIANT bedroom!

Dorchester House

Hot hot hot!

Dear friends and family,

Something I forgot to mention in my last blog post was how incredibly hot it is here. Since we've arrived, the maximum temperature has always been above 30 degrees, and on most days it's been above 35. Combined with the unbelievable humidity, on the milder days it feels like someone's hot breath on you all the time, on the hotter days it's just like being in an oven. Air-conditioning is a life-saver, but as you sometimes have to step out of the air-conditioned comfort, there are a number of survival strategies. Mine consist of always carrying a bottle of water with me (I cool them in the fridge), and accepting that I am going to be drenched with sweat within about five minutes of leaving the house.

On Friday evening, we went to look at a flat in Takoma Park, a suburb in Maryland, just outside the border of the District of Columbia. André and I picked up a very useful book on one of our first days here called, 'Newcomer's Handbook for moving to and living in Washington D.C.'. In it, it gives brief descriptions of all the neighbourhoods in Washington, as well as some of the more popular areas to live in the surrounding states of Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia. Some extracts about what it says about Takoma Park:

"In the Birkenstocks-and-incense community of Takoma Park, the two-party system is Democrats and Greens. City government here boycotts the nuclear industry (so you won't find GE lightbulbs in schools or libraries) and companies that do business in Burma (so no Pepsi machines in municipal buildings). Legal aliens who own or rent homes here are allowed to vote in municipal elections and serve on the city council or school board. In addition, the city has won awards for its recycling efferts and tree conservation, and has been given the nickname 'Azalea City' for the colorful bushes that bloom in many front yards in late spring. A thriving food co-op and farmers' market meet the huge demand for natural and organic food, and the neighborhood eateries along Carroll Avenue - an authentic neighborhood street - are careful to provide vegetarian and vegan selections. Many residential streets have 'speed humps' (much bigger than speed bumps, residents explain) to keep traffic from endangering cyclists, pedestrians, and children at play.

[...]

"Except for a few boxy apartment high-rises along Maple Avenue, Takoma Park's hilly, winding streets are lined with nice houses in varied styles: cozy bungalows, clapboard Victorians, and duplexes or big cottages that have been broken up into apartments. [...] Shaded with mature trees, the typical block is charming; in the spring and summer many yards burst with colorful blooms, particularly forsythia and azaleas. Some homes have tidy watch-pocket yards, wile others have Sligo Creek Park for a backyard."

Sounded good to me! On Friday evening, I met up with André at a central metro station and we took the metro out to Takoma Park together. It was sweltering, so we stopped at a Seven-Eleven to get something to drink and to get our blood sugar up. That little bottle of water/iced tea didn't go very far, though. The walk to the place was about half an hour in the heat. When we got there, we were greeted by a guy wearing a baseball cap with long, bushy red hair and a long, unkempt beard. It turned out he was the agent ("but I don't like to call it that, because 'agent' has all sorts of other connotations..."). After producing a number of large bunches of keys from his pockets and realising he didn't have the key with him (he quickly ran and fetched it), he led us up the stairs of the smallish, red-brick apartment block. (You can take a look at the advert at http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/mld/apa/1841221791.html) The stairwell smelled of new paint, and the walls were lined with a kind of linoleum-type fake marble that must have dated from the 60s. The flat itself was roomy, with two good-sized bedrooms. But the windows were small (maybe only a metre high), there was no dishwasher in the kitchen, and the laundry was in the basement. And the flat itself was on the 3rd floor. And the carpet was AWFUL - a kind of cream with orange and beige speckles. (I know it's shallow, but I just couldn't see myself looking at it for a whole year. Especially as the entire house (except the kitchen and bathroom) was fitted with it. Wall-to-wall. Ugh!)

On the way home, André and I chatted and we agreed that this wasn't going to be it. Besides the inherent characteristics of the flat that we didn't like (I think I'd feel couped up in there), it's to the north of DC, and it turns out André's offices, which are currently in Camp Springs to the South East, won't be moving up that way for at least another year due to delays incurred by a law suit. So we're back looking for something central in DC, preferably Adams Morgan. I loved Takoma Park, though, so maybe we can look there once it's time to buy a house. (As a result of this conversation, we decided to cancel the appointment we had to look at another place there on Saturday).

On Saturday morning, we went to look at a place in the U-Street area. This area was traditionally very important to the civil liberties movement in the 60s, and many of the race riots started there. Today, the neighbourhood looks a lot like downtown Bellville/Parow. The place we looked at was very nice: an old house that had been subdivided into two apartments. But it was in the worst kind of neighbourhood, with shady characters sitting on the street corners and a kind of flea market on the next block. So we decided to give it a miss.

Yesterday, we went for a bit of a walk around Adams Morgan (in the heat). The area really is lovely, especially if you can get a place in one of the tree-lined neighbourhoods. But a big apartment block is okay too, we decided. So I'll be phoning a few agents this morning.

Yesterday was also the first of our church shopping expeditions. I left it rather late, and so ended up just picking a church in the neighbourhood, and this time it was the Goodwill Baptist Church. As soon as we arrived, we realised that this was going to be an old-school African-American service. We were the only white people there! The congregation was very small - maybe 20 or 30 people scattered around the church, most of them elderly ladies, and the 'Goodwill Baptist Gospel Choir' consisted of 3 ladies in white gowns plus the choir leader. They were accompanied by 3 older gentlemen on piano/keyboard/hammond organ, electrical guitar and drums. The singing wasn't always quite in tune, but the three instrumentalists were great! And the people were really friendly and welcoming, and the message was really encouraging. So maybe we'll go back to visit now and then, even if we don't make it our home church.

On Saturday evening, we went to watch 'Inception' at the IMAX theatre in Alexandria, Virginia. We didn't quite get the full immersion effect from the IMAX we had hoped for, as we were sitting in the second row from the front, to one side, but the movie was amazing! I can highly recommend it. And if you can't follow it, go again. It really stayed with me, and I found myself thinking about it much of the next day. Very powerful.

x Annemarie

Hallo Washington!

Dear friends and family,

I promised I'd give you all an update on how things have been going, so here it is: my brand new blog/newsletter!

We arrived at Dulles International Airport on Sunday, around the time the World Cup final started. All our luggage arrived with us, and my cello survived the journey very well, much to my relief, given United's bad reputation when it comes to transporting musical instruments! (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FGc4zOqozo)

After a slight hitch with the key, we finally got into our apartment and could settle in. The flat is lovely, with wooden floors and luxurious finishings, but I don't think it's much bigger in terms of floorspace than our living room in Delft. There isn't even a separate bedroom - just a bed that folds up into a cupboard!

It does have a complete kitchen, though, and I've been thoroughly enjoying the dishwasher and oven, not to mention the decent-sized fridge! Food is quite a challenge over here. I am paranoid about becoming fat Americans, so every trip to the supermarket is spent scrutinizing ingredient lists and nutritional information. We do our shopping at a small supermarket called Safeway just up the road, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised at the nice fresh fruit and vegetables they've got there. It's remarkable, though, how everything seems to come in packaging sizes that are just more than I want. The other evening, Andre commented on how remarkably many TV advertisements pitch their products to families here, and I suspect that the bigger packaging points to a society that is more family-oriented than Holland, where the supermarkets seem to cater more to singles and couples. Andre thinks it's a way to get people to consume more, and he's probably right. I just find it a terrible shame to be forced to buy more than I can use up before it goes off and have to throw what's left away.

Besides the well-known fact that Americans like fried foods, you could say the taste here generally runs toward the sweet. Most things have some form of sugar or sweetener in them, making dodging hidden calories a nightmare. All the supermarket bread has added sugar. We found a good French bakery down the road (Le Pain Quotidien - there are branches all over DC!), but there a loaf of bread costs $3.50, making it a bit of a pricey exercise. I've come to the conclusion that the only answer is to buy a bread maker and make our own bread. But for now, we're eating sweet supermarket bread.

In a way, you can understand why Americans eat so much junk food: it makes economic sense. The other day, I bought a small pack of lean mince (about 360 g) with which to make lasagne, and it cost $4.19. So that's without the pasta, the cheese and the other fresh ingredients. You can get a hamburger meal for about $5, and you don't have to spend time preparing it. Then you understand.

I must say, though, I haven't seen very many hugely obese people. One naturally tends to notice the extremes, but on the whole they're definitely in a very small minority in DC. In fact, what strikes me is how many 'normal' people there are. This is very likely because this is DC, a city with many highly educated people and at least half a dozen universities and colleges in and around it. I believe the picture is very different if you move further south, or to the smaller towns.

On the whole, people here are a lot more colourful in Holland, and by that I don't just mean lots of different races altogether (because that is the case too). For one thing, women dress a lot more elegantly than women in Holland. It's been so nice to see all the dresses and skirts, teamed with make-up and pretty shoes. I do my best to keep up! Also, you don't have the 'Hollandse nuchterheid' - the governing principle for behaviour in the Netherlands that says people should be reasonable, restrained and rational. Here, people laugh and talk uninhibitedly in the street and in the metro (underground), are not afraid to get emotional about stuff (in fact it happens remarkebly often that TV programmes will use swelling music to stir up emotions) and, above all, are unashamedly, unreservedly proud of their country. When we walked into the bank on Monday to open an account and told them we had only just arrived, the first response whoever we spoke to was always a hearty, 'Well, welcome to America!' You see the flag everywhere: on T-shirts, in malls, flown in front of people's homes and other buildings (government and otherwise), on the sides of trucks...

Andre and I were talking about it when we were here in December. It seems Americans don't have the squeamishness about open displays of nationalism that the Europeans seem to have got as a lasting result of the Second World War. Not to mention the complicated relationship that a white South African has with their country, given recent history...

Yesterday, I went on a little exploration expedition to some shops in Columbia Heights, an area to the north east of where we are staying in DC. My mission: to buy a kettle. I had looked on the Internet, and come to the conclusion I needed to be at a shop called 'Best Buy'. When I got there, however, they turned out to mainly sell electronics, and had a grand total of one (!) kettle to choose from. Fortunately, Best Buy was in a shopping complex with some other shops: one downstairs that made me think I'd arrived in Pep/Zeeman on steroids, and then two others that were okay: one called 'Target' and the other 'Bed, Bath and Beyond'. Both are massive shops with a mind-boggling array of products to choose from. For the Dutchies: Target is Hema on steroids. For the Seffricans: Bed, Bath and Beyond is Mr Price Home on steroids. I only took a short look around in both, and was overwhelmed by the massive choice. There were so many beautiful things for the home! I can understand why people throw a lot of things away - you want new stuff all the time, because you don't want to have to choose between all the pretty things in the shop! Not that I intend to go that route - but it will be fun when we get to set up our own home soon.

These early days are all about gathering information, and every day brings another flood of it. It's not only about finding our way around, but also about taking note of where to buy things we may need. The past week has also been about doing some basic admin and setting up the structures that we had to break down or tie off in Holland before we left. We now have a bank account, have applied for a social security number for André and we have phone contracts (although Andre has to wait until he has a phone, because he wanted the newest iPhone and it had to be ordered). We are going to look at two potential places to rent this evening and tomorrow afternoon respectively. I need to find out about whether we can drive with our South African driver's licences, with a view to getting licences from here and buying a car. Yesterday, André brought some brochures with information about medical insurance options, and it turns out we don't have to pay such a horrendous amount for medical insurance: only $189 a month instead of the $850 we were first told - a huge relief!

So things are slowly falling into place.

I will mail you all from my new email address, which is linked to my phone, so I look forward to hearing your news too!

x Annemarie (and André)

PS: for more photos, please see my facebook album at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=499978&id=894080450&l=a79ec8b6be