At lunch, I had the best vegetarian sandwich I have ever had on amazing whole wheat bread at this little bread specialty deli called Great Harvest. Since Callan needed a haircut and Great CLips was right across the street, we decided to have that checked off the to do list. It is nice traveling and not being such a tourist and almost continuing normal day to day life in cool places like SLC. After meeting up with John and Lena, his girlfriend, we went up to Park City and checked into the Marriott Mountainside. After regrouping and unpacking we went out to dinner at this Asian Fusion place. MJ and Cal stayed home, since she was feeling sick, so Lena, John, Dad and I enjoyed live music at this restaurant and a weird mixture of food from sushi to jambalaya. It was definitely colder than in DC. Here is a picture of Lena and myself.
Sunday was really nice, after a nice sleep in huge white beds, Dad made eggs and English muffins. MJ, Cal and I went to the outlet stores to search for snow boots for me since there was supposed to be a snow storm back in DC and I was needing a pair. Then, MJ dropped Cal and I off at the kids center back at the hotel and we went sledding with a group, while she went to pick her mother, Mary Ellen up at the airport. Then they met us back up at the sledding hills and I was really surprised when Mary Ellen began to slide down the hill with her 7 year old grandson. After sledding, Mary Ellen and I took a walk downtown and shopped a little on the main street. We went into this bookstore / candy shop (a great combination) and I was looking at tour books on San Francisco; thinking about their nice weather; all those great places in my city makes me a little homesick, but DC is a great place to explore. When we got back, MJ and I went to the grocery store to get food to cook for dinner and since she was feeling sick I decided to cool pasta with fettuccine Alfredo sauce and mushrooms, onions, broccoli, and tomatoes. It was amazing and I ended up cooking for 8! John, Lena, Mary Ellen, Callan, myself, MJ, Dad, and our great family friend from home Josh Hohl. After dinner Callan went to race his infamous car at the kids center and Josh, John, Lena my Dad and I played poker. My dad is such a jokester when it comes to poker, it is great to laugh at him. Here is a video of Callan sledding.
The next morning, Monday, was President's day, so I had off from my internship and stayed to ski in the morning with Josh, John and my Dad. We did a few runs then I came back for a little lunch and then Lena drove me straight to the airport. The weekend went by quickly but was overall very relaxing and nice to see my whole family. Going to Park City almost every year has been a great tradition and this may be the last winter John will be living in SLC since he wants to move off somewhere cold to Eastern Europe sometime soon, I guess it all depends on job availability and what will attract him.
It ended up taking me about 24 hours to get back to DC. Getting on two flights right off the bat from DC to SLC and flying in first class was a little too good to be true. Soooo many people were flying out on President's day. I made it to Denver alright, but then was stuck there for about 7 hours and finally at 9:30 at night made it to Chicago where I stayed the night and then woke up early to get to Dulles. It was nice to be finally home.
Classes this week were good, I had my first exam on the Political Theories in my Foreign Policy Seminar on Wednesday. Professor Maisch is such a jokester, he was teasing us that we were going to endure the Spanish-Peruvian Inquisition and he always makes silly jokes on our syllabi about the foreign students in our class, especially the French guy Nicolas. Then on Friday we went to the British Embassy and met with four young foreign policy advisers to London. They were cracking jokes and telling us how much they love America (partly I think because they have houses 3X the size as in London). They conducted the lecture / talk differently than any of our previous speakers- they asked us what we wanted to know about and what questions we had then talked about those issues and tried to answer our questions. They dressed very casual (partly because it was a Friday and they were young). The Embassy building was a huge brick long mansion! It was a great experience!
On Saturday I went to an all day conference at Georgetown University. I took the metro to Dupont station then the bus through Georgetown and it was so beautiful. The houses are amazing and the some of the streets are cobblestone. I overheard the bus driver telling someone all the famous people who live or have lived in the neighborhood and he was pointing to different houses. "This house was inhabited by John Kerry, and that one Madeline Albright...." I heard the Ambassador from the State Department who works on combating human trafficking speak about US initiatives to free mainly women and children from sex and labor work. The only other country that has a public official is Sweden, which is very ironic because literally almost every country in the world is faced with the issues of modern day slavery- that is people being exploited with force fraud or coercion to work in the commercial sex industry or in agricultural production and so many other fields. Everyone on the panel and all the speakers really know what they are talking about. There was a good point made, that most of the people there were young, in their 20's and 30's and this is because of the recent grassmovent effort and all the non profit global benefits that have popped up in the last decade to address the issue; also, that students and people wishing to pursue the field can rise very quickly among organizations can because young people today are really the experts on trafficking. Anyways, I learned a lot!
Monday and Tuesday were my internship days as always and they were good and I am learning more and more about non profits. My FP (Foreign Policy) class is headed to the Russian Embassy this week, I know my brother would have loved to come...so it will be interesting!
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