Judas, Do You Betray Me With An Orange Julius? More Tourism in the Lesser Washington

Ask me how I spend my days in D.C. and I’d probably reply: I go to school, come home, drink a beer, watch MSNBC until I grow tired of Chris Matthews shouting at me, go to bed. Repeat the next day. But as I look back on my phone’s photo roll, I find proof that I did occasionally deviate from this depressing routine. Perhaps some demon right outside my window drove me away? Speaking of traitors to the United States of America, the original Robert E. Lee estate that’s now Arlington National Cemetery is quite close but the house and much of the cemetery landscape is under renovation and inaccessible to the public so I only made a quick stop to see some of the graves of kick ass Supreme Court Justices. Dunno why the Supreme Court was on my mind.

While now isn’t the best time to visit the cemetery, metro-ing into D.C. is easy and I luckily have friends and family who either live here or who visited and coaxed me out into the wider world. Courtney and I checked out the Newseum (awesome collection of original newspapers!) and when Marie visited we stopped by the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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I didn’t always need friends to lure me outside as a few of my classes included field trips. Not just to the CIA, but also to State Department specific spots. First, the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, kind of an odd duck among D.C. sights. You don’t enter through an imposing 18th or 19th century edifice. Instead you’re in the 1939 Harry S Truman Building, complete with a WPA mural. But go upstairs and you’ll find yourself in a place that looks (and, weirdly, smells?) like a post colonial mansion. As our tour guide explained, decorating these rooms began in the 1960s when folks got tired of how the U.S. was always upstaged by other countries with their fancy palaces and reception halls. So they raised private funding (hey! Your tax dollars not at work) and created these rooms to showcase early Americana.

Part of a WPA Mural at the State Department

First Lady Louisa Adams

Thomas Jefferson signed the Treaty of Paris on this desk (probably).

Benjamin Franklin and the King of France Depicted in Porcelain

At the “no photos allowed” (boo!) National Archives, we were supposed to be on the lookout for State Department documents filed using the system we learned in OMS class.

It also houses originals of The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. But I found something better: a signed receipt for Charles Ingalls’s payment on his Dakota Territory homestead!!!!! Curses be rained upon whoever decided on the ‘no pics’ policy. Fortunately, there’s no such policy at the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress Lobby

Reading Room

The LOC is connected by underground tunnel to the Capitol. I did a tour there too but not the kind you arrange ahead with your congressperson to get into chambers. The one I took was very basic and very crowded, so while the guide was knowledgeable and I was happy to see the rotunda and and all the statues, I wouldn’t rush back unless I had a more comprehensive look-see.

Inside the dome

George Washington in a blankie

Three suffragists and a marble blob hovering over them that, I assume, represents the patricarchy

The hottest ticket in town? Two years after opening, it is still serious business to get into the National Museum of African American History and Culture. When I first got here (July) they were taking reservations for December. However, they do some weekday walk-ins and limited same day tickets are released each morning at 6:30. Some of the content is obviously very heavy (I saw more than one person in tears) but there is also a lot of celebration and a lot of history that wasn’t taught in my schools, including the economics of slavery and the frequency of revolts (more than Nat Turner!). I also appreciated the museum as an answer to some of the feelings I’d been feeling after visiting the above-mentioned monuments to American greatness. Especially at the National Archives, where I stood in front of the founding documents, I got a little emotional thinking about promises vs. reality. The African American museum can’t solve those jarring inconsistencies, but it does confront them. “All men are created equal” is emblazoned on a wall in a large gallery. Underneath is a statue of Thomas Jefferson, positioned in front of a brick wall where you can read the names of many of the 609 people held in slavery by our third president over the course of his lifetime.

Union Soldiers

Amulet in the shape of shackles, used by the West African Lobi people to protect against enslavement.

Enough of the heavy stuff. Let’s be real about the sights I was most interested in. It’s all about the scandals! I went to the pizzagate restaurant…

Pizzagate Featured at the Newseum

and to Le Diplomate, featured in WaPo’s list of top abuses of power regarding former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt…

Gina and Colleen sending me off with champagne and seafood

and the parking garage where Deep Throat met with Woodward and Bernstein…

Deep Throat Parking Garage

This is the very spot

and to Watergate (fun fact: Shanna made the restaurant reservations and told us that the hold “music” consists of Nixon speeches).

But by far my most exciting discovery was courtesy of the podcast Slow Burn, about events leading to Clinton’s impeachment. One Saturday afternoon while running errands near my ho-partment, I realized that the places being described to me through my earbuds were in the very neighborhood I was walking through! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 1998 Garden of Gethsemane…the mall food court where Linda Tripp turned Monica Lewinksy over to the FBI.

Till next time D.C. I’m Kazakhstan bound!

Training Camp

What has the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has been doing with me since late July? The training schedule doesn’t make for fascinating reading (until maybe the end) but it is, after all, your tax dollars at work. So here’s the rundown:

• Most sessions take place at FSI or, more specifically, the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center. You might remember Schultz as the former Secretary of State credited with helping to end the Cold War. Or as the guy who more recently got conned by the fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos.

 

Ben Franklin: First Diplomat

Foreign Service Institute

• We started with three weeks of orientation for all of the Specialists. That includes medical officers, security officers, office managers, IT specialists, and more. This provided an introduction to working in both the State Department and the Foreign Service. Our orientation leaders played the roles of teacher, counselor, and babysitter as they guided us through these weeks of adjusting to the culture, expectations, and procedures at State. They helped us with how to dress, how to act (stand when the ambassador enters the room), and how to stay calm when everything is falling apart. At the end of the three weeks we were officially sworn in by the Secretary of State. The dress code for these three weeks required me to wear a blazer every day. Blech. But it was only for three weeks and then we were done so it didn’t kill me. Plus orientation included a field trip to the CIA and who doesn’t love a field trip?

• After orientation it was blazers off and into a training schedule set by our career development officers, based on our specialties and our specific assignment. Foreign Service Officers and a few select Specialists are offered a whole year of language training but sadly, Office Management Specialists rarely get much. One member of our class is doing a year of Mandarin and a couple others get a few months of Spanish. The rest of us go without.

• All the OMSes and many of the other specialists took two weeks of “Area Studies” in which we learned about the history and culture of the region where we’re headed. Most regions have a dominant country or countries that wind up becoming the focus of the class. With people in my class headed to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, Russia was our 800 pound gorilla. I think other classes had a hard time applying information about their region’s dominant country to their specific post. But it made sense to study Russia in order to understand any of the countries in my class. Plus our very engaging instructor always helped us bring whatever we were learning back to something about our next country posting. Super helpful.

• OMSes like me who are going to work in a Regional Security Office had a few days to be trained directly by Diplomatic Security. We got an insiders’ tour on how they keep the embassies and embassy staff safe including armored vehicles (we saw one that had been attacked so we could see how the armor and bullet proof glass held up), different kinds of secure doors, and the Diplomatic Security Command Center that looks like the set of 24 and is where they track what’s going on with security at all U.S. embassies worldwide.

• Three weeks of OMS school gave all the new OMSes time to learn about the different systems we will use, how to format important documents (oxford comma and double space after a period), and how to create a seating chart for official dinner.

 

OMS Class Photo

 

• Miscellaneous days learning SharePoint and other technology tools and “consultation days” that can be used to get business done like arranging vaccines, meeting with D.C.-based staff who work with your country, applying for your visa and your diplomatic passport.

• Foreign Affairs Counter Threat (FACT, aka “Crash and Bang”) is the one everyone wants to hear about. It used to be required only for people going to high threat posts like Baghdad or Kabul. But post-Benghazi and in a world where we’ve seen attacks in Paris, Nice, Brussels, and other “safe” countries, we are all required to take this course. To be clear, this is a one week course and I did not become Le Femme Nikita in that time. But I did practice fleeing an active shooter, tying a tourniquet, packing a hemorrhaging wound, bandaging a sucking chest wound, driving backwards, ramming another car (forwards and backwards), making my way out of a burning building, detecting and reporting surveillance, and more. We were not allowed to take pictures which you, dear reader, are probably grateful for as I would certainly have included several images of mannequins with their mannequin intestines on the outside of their body. Fortunately for you, there is some publicly available video.

 

Again, I will stress that none of us become experts at any of this. But at least now I do know some basic self defense, as well as how to tie a tourniquet and how easy it is to ram a car out of the way. I hope I never need to use any of these skills.