Washington DC

Lost track of what day it is. Vacations are great that way aren't they? Until you lose track so badly you don't realise you have to go back to work. But no matter! Nowhere near that yet, one more city to get to first, one more country to hop to!

In the meantime, the good folks at Amtrak are providing me free wifi to blog from while I ride the 3.5 hour train from Washington DC back to New York. What were we doing in Washington DC? Well this whole trip is mini reunion of ex-London KPMG friends, all of whom transferred from around the world to London KPMG in September 2005. I am not sure when we gathered in that fateful training in Basingstoke (was not impressed. Really not impressed) that we even fathomed that we would stay in touch for 7 years. We all thought we would be in London for about 2 years, and indeed, over time, many have departed London on schedule, and so we have started spreading ourselves all over the world. Of the 6 of us that met up again this week, we came from Toronto, Vancouver, Atlanta, NYC, and Sydney. Now, years later, between us there are 3 new Masters degrees (and three new non accounting careers) and three of my friends have not returned home but instead done stints in South Sudan, Michigan, Washington DC, Ottawa, finally settling for the next while in DC and NYC. So when I left London to return to my roots in May and Emma left London to return to Sydney last week, we decided a party in DC/NYC was necessary to mark the occasion.

I didn't see too much in DC in the last two days but that was absolutely fine by me given I know I will be back again sometime because Keith is a geek and there's no way he would want to miss DC altogether. But we did spend 3.5 hours in the American History Museum and I now know more about American presidency facts than I do about the Canadian Prime Ministers (not a difficult bar set there). Uncultured me found the First Ladies dresses one of the best exhibits, and also Julia Child's kitchen. Oh and the Star Spangled Banner, the original one that flew over the fort in Baltimore when the Americans defended it from British invasion in the late 1810's. Raggedy. It inspired the song that is the American national anthem today. I must admit I like that song. Very emotion welling. (Also always reminds me of the fictional Ramona Quimby of the children's books by Beverly Cleary who thought the words were "dawnzer lee light", concluded a dawnzer must be a lamp, and then embarrassingly asked her dad to please turn the dawnzer on. Oh the things that stay in your brain sometimes)

Today we went for a lovely brunch then attempted to walk around but it was too hot so managed to see the White House, the Washington monument, but not really the Lincoln memorial. It did inspire Emma to recommend that I read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter which I promptly downloaded , sounds like a good airplane read for Friday!!

Signing off with a few photos - the Julia Child kitchen, me at the White House (where I kept recommending to Sara as if, as the American of the group, it is up to her to make such improvements that they should fly the flag only when Obama is in residence like they do with the Queen), a plaque commemorating the friendship between America and Canada and as symbolized by Sara and I, and a DC metro station which I think is quite purty.