Today is a bank holiday, for Memorial Day and the city is deserted. It's the weirdest thing - bank holidays are obviously done very differently here. In Britain, it's a chance to hang out and go shopping on a weekday and there's always loads of people milling around. But I can only guess that in DC, people flee the city for the whole weekend.
Seriously, most shops are shut and there's hardly anyone on the streets. I walked Maxy to work this morning and, where there's usually a throng of busy commuters, we could count the people we passed on the fingers of one hand. It was a bit like we'd fallen asleep and woken up after an apocalypse (but one that shopkeepers knew was coming, so they closed up first).
The reason Max is working today is that national holidays aren't included in his contract, so he has to take them as annual leave. This means he can work the national holidays - when the office is really quiet and he can go in late and leave early - and save up the holiday for our big roadtrip at the end of our stay here. Fiendish, eh?
On our way to his work, we saw a squirrel scampering around in a garden, then noticed a chirpy bird nearby too and thought it was like a touching scene from 'Enchanted', or something. Until we realised that the bird was terrorising the squirrel! Seriously - it was really going for it and the squirrel was running scared, taking cover whenever possible. It was amazing and we watched, transfixed, for quite some time. Ah, the violence of the natural world. But seriously - that squirrel could have had the bird - I don't know what it was thinking by running away.
I met Maxy for lunch, but we couldn't find anywhere that was open, so had to make do with a burrito at a Mexican fast food chain called Chipotle. It wasn't so nice. I look forward to restaurants opening up again after the holiday.
After a gruelling six hour day, Maxy knocked off and we went in search of one of the city's public outdoor swimming pools for a bit of late afternoon splish splash - it's still exceedingly hot here. We found the pool - just by the apartment block where we stayed when we first got here - but there was no water in it and it was closed. It was such a bummer and SO hot.
So we wandered home, planning to dump our stuff and head out to the movies. But when we got to the apartment, there was a note on our door from our lovely neighbour Anne, inviting us out to drinks up the road in Adams Morgan!
With a handy couple of hours to spare, we polished off series 2 of 'The West Wing' and then headed out to meet Anne.
We went to The Reef, which has a fantastic roof terrace, overlooking Adams Morgan (left) and down to the Washington Monument. Anne's boyfriend Hugh came along, so we got to meet him properly, having only previously met him in passing. Then Anne's cousin (and flatmate) Megan arrived with her boyfriend (and Josh Groban doppelganger) Jonathan.
It was such a fun night - they're all incredibly nice and terrific company and we just couldn't stop thinking how lucky we are that we live in this sunny city with roof terraces where lovely neighbours leave notes on our door to go out for impromptu fun drinks. It's a little like being back at university, in having total independence but very few responsibilities or cares.
One *slight* care that cropped up over the evening is that Megan is evidently the perfect woman for Maxy. Yeah, slight glitch there. She's really funny and is a speech writer for a very small, high-powered firm set up by two people from the Clinton administration. She's written speeches for George Clooney on Darfur, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and other good and important people. She basically is Sam Seabourne and her bosses have said they'll help her get into Obama's administration, if he gets the presidency. Gnaaah.
Now none of this is particularly new - we've met super-clever political girls before - but Megan couples her high-powered political goodness with a great love of popular culture, owning a DVD collection to rival only mine and featuring staples such as 'Alias', 'Veronica Mars', 'Arrested Development' and of course, 'The West Wing'. Hmph.
Anyways, her boyfriend Jonathan is really nice, too. He works for a think tank set up by Clinton but now supportive of Obama and he's hoping to get into the government if Obama wins, too. And I cannot tell you how much he looks like Josh Groban.
Drinks turned into dinner, during which Hugh bought some random guy in military uniform a drink, which was interesting, and Anne pointed out a 'typical DC couple' - a silver-haired old guy with a very young girlfriend on his arm. Apparently this is the norm in the city and it kind of grossed us all out. Never more so than when the guy left, leaving his 'girlfriend' behind and taking a woman who was quite clearly her mother/his wife with him! Whoops.
I had lovely chats with Anne, during which it became quite apparent that we're extremely similar and are going to be firm friends. She had to go home relatively early as she had work to do before tomorrow. So we left with her and helped her with the extremely boring data entry work she had to do for a while, but could take it no more and sloped home, clutching series 3 of 'The West Wing' in our sweaty palms.
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