I’ve now spent two months in Washington D.C. preparing to embark on my first assignment.
Do I love the company town energy? The religious devotion to ties and blazers? The way in which the inside and outside temperatures are completely divorced from each other? Not so much. I remain a west coast loyalist.
But I can acknowledge that D.C. has interesting sights to see, what with being the nation’s capitol and all.
While I’ve been in training and on a short leash, I have nonetheless gotten to see several places of note.
When I came here in December for the oral assessment, it was actually the first time I’d ever been a tourist in D.C. Before, I’d been here before for meetings and marches with little time for sightseeing. This past December was the first time I could enjoy time to walk around the National Mall and see the Lincoln Memorial.
Our first Republican president. Quite a legacy to live up to. I wonder how that’s working out.
Lincoln is awesome and all, but the highlight of my winter visit was the Renwick Gallery’s exhibit featuring crime scene dioramas by Frances Glessner Lee. I love a murder mystery!
While that particular exhibit has since ended, the great thing about D.C. is how many of the museums are free to explore. So we also popped into the National Gallery, home of a Lucretia by Rembrandt that pairs beautifully with my favorite back in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (psst…the Minneapolis one is better).
Fast forward to the summer. My sister Colleen planned a visit for our nephew Zeke well before I got the invitation to come to D.C. myself. Sidenote: as much as the timing of this whole process has been insane (I had three and a half weeks notice to pack up life and move across the country), it was also fortuitous in many ways, coming just after my trip to Belize with Keara, right before my lease was up, and coinciding with Zeke’s visit.
Colleen and Shanna kept him to a busy schedule of sightseeing but the Foreign Service Institute had me on an even busier schedule so I wasn’t able to accompany them on all the adventures. I did manage the Air and Space Museum and Ford’s Theater.
I did not accompany them to the International Spy Museum but guess what I did get to see? The CIA’s own museum in Langley! Not for your everyday tourists. It was arranged via a class field trip requiring we all have a special badge and leave our phones and all other electronic devices in the school bus. This was a very sad moment for me. When everyone put their electronic car key beep-beeps into a bag and not a single one of my classmates made a joke about 1970s key parties…well, I’ve never felt more alone.
No pictures inside the CIA’s Langley HQ, but I can tell you I saw some stuff straight out of James Bond and Get Smart. And I did come home with a couple of souvenirs. Because the CIA has a gift shop.
In Foreign Places 