It's so much fun having Kate here - I'm getting to do all the things I thought I'd do when we moved here and I didn't have a job, but haven't done because they're not so much fun without a buddy.
Yesterday, we spent the whole day in Georgetown in the sunny warm sunshine, shopping til we dropped. Fortunately Kate - unlike Maxy on similar expeditions - was very much in the mood for buying and we had great fun, making her try on clothes she wouldn't normally wear (ie: colourful and tight) and she ended up buying loads of really gorgeous things.
At one point, I burst into tears like at the end of a style makeover show, when Kate emerged from a dressing room in a killer black dress and high heels that totally complimented everything about her amazing height and extreme skinniness, but that we never get to see in the clothes she normally wears. Eat your heart out, Trinny and Susannah!
As befits ladies cruising the shops of Georgetown, we had lunch at Cafe Leopold's, my favourite daytime Georgetown haunt. Afterwards, we planned to do a bit more shopping (the sales are CRAZY!! I got three cashmere jumpers from Gap for £100! And some AWESOME green suede wedge shoes - Kate wasn't the only person branching out from her comfort zone! - for £22!) then go to the movies again. However, Anthropologie sucked us in and wouldn't let us go.
We were in there for aaaaages! And we tried on loads of stuff. I decided to try to follow the advice of my friend Jilly and invest in a couple of expensive but well made things that would make my wardrobe a bit more grown up and sophisticated than the extensive array of jeans and t-shirts in which I parade around DC. I bought a gorgeous skirt that I can't really describe, but it was amazing and made me look like the grown up I'd like to be. But when Max's reaction was a little luke-warm last night, I panicked and took it back today, because it was mondo-expensive and there were some stripey cashmere jumpers with buttons on the shoulder (MUCH more me!) on sale in Banana Republic, so I snapped them up instead.
While we were single-handedly propping up the US economy, Max was working on the hilarious story of Rob Blagojevich, Governor of Illinois, who's been trying to sell Obama's senate seat to the highest bidder! The funniest thing about the story is how defiant he is, despite there being actual wiretap evidence of him trying to make the deal with Jesse Jackson Jr! Apparently there's a rich heritage of the Governors of Illinois being crooked. In fact, so many have gone to jail for corruption (including Blagojevich's predecessor) that you're now statistically more likely to end up in prison as a disgraced Governor in Illinois than you are a murderer!
This morning, Kate and I went on a tour of the Capitol. On arrival at the just-opened new visitor centre, a greeter detected that we're British and said we were allowed to go and watch the Senate in session! If we were American, we'd have to get tickets from our Senator's office, but because we're foreign, we could walk right in! So we excitedly made our way to the Senate, through miles of corridors and security checks and took up our seats, just in time for a handful of senators and pages to come in and take their seats.
We were given a seating plan of the floor, so we could see where people like Obama and Hillary would sit if they were present and were interested to see that there was a lady there who's a parliamentarian, so just an expert on the political process, who I guess is deferred to in matters of procedure.
There was very little exciting happening in the Senate this morning - we heard the Senate majority leader through something about the auto bailout, and then his Republican counterpart articulately reply, then Liddy Dole started delivering her farewell speech having lost her seat in North Carolina after running an EVIL campaign, accusing her Christian opponent of being 'godless' because she attended a fundraiser at the house of two atheists.
When Liddy started paying tribute to her high school teachers, we knew it was going to be a long speech, so decided to leave. Probably the coolest thing we saw were the stenographers, who were wearing their stenographing machines around their necks, like they were selling ice creams in a theatre, and would go and stand right in front of the person speaking and watch their lips as they tapped away.
Although what was actually happening in the Senate was quite boring, it was really fun to be there and see what's what and the tour of the Capitol was a bit of a let-down by comparison. We saw some nice artwork and the statuary room, where each state has sent two statues of local 
dignitaries (Mississippi inexplicably saw fit to send one of massive racist and President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis) and we also saw the first ever Supreme Court (left), where cases like Amistad and Dred Scott were tried, which was pretty powerful.
Perhaps to make up for the slightly boring tour, or perhaps because she lives by herself with only cats for company, our tour guide was SO enthusiastic, to the point of breaking my heart! She was really cheery and energetic, kind of willing us to enjoy ourselves and desperate that we have a good time. She'd even say, 'good job!' when we all managed to get up the escalator.
One quite cool thing she showed us was how, when John Adams was sitting at his desk in the old Senate chamber, a quirk of architecture allowed him to hear his opponents on the other side, whispering about him. Our over-enthusiastic tour guide demonstrated this very excitedly (right) and it was indeed pretty cool.
Kate and I did our very best to listen extra-attentively and make her feel appreciated in the face of fairly non-plussed tourists.
After our tour, I took Kate around the boutiques of U St, 14th St and the mighty Shake Your Booty on 18th St, but they were all a bit disappointing and certainly couldn't top our Georgetown triumphs of shopping. After a quick bite at Love Cafe, complete with its amazing cupcake bar, we hot-footed it into Georgetown, in time to see 'Australia'.
We had to walk really quickly and were knackered by the time we got to the cinema, just in time 
to relax in front of a 3 hour movie! As we were going into the cinema, I noticed that the Potomac looked like it had evaporated and been replaced by enough dry ice to service a Jean Michel Jarre concert! It was really eery...
Despite terrible reviews, Kate and I both loooooved 'Australia'. I suspect that the generous number of shots of the gorgeous Hugh Jackman emerging from smoke helped get us on side! I just loved how it's a throwback to the great epic Saturday afternoon movies that you don't see anymore. Sure, the effects are dodgy, the plot is predictable and Nicole Kidman looks like a toothpick, but it's sweeping and epic and romantic and Hugh Jackman 
walks through smoke a lot. AND rides a horse a lot - turns out that's an extremely sexy quality in a man. The little boy at the heart of the movie is gorgeous, too. Apparently, Baz Luhrmann cast him after sitting opposite him on a bus. Yeah, like Baz rides the bus.
Kate and I emerged from the cinema all a-quiver, and I felt a bit sorry for Max meeting us for dinner at Nathans, because unless he happened upon a big bit of smoke and was able to suddenly look a bit grubby, like he'd been wrangling cattle in the outback for a month, he didn't stand a chance of making us forget about gorgeous Hugh!
Fortunately I snapped myself out of it and we had a lovely meal at Nathans before going home 
and decorating our Christmas tree. Yeay! We got it yesterday and brought it home on the bike, attracting lots of admiring comments from passers-by! Usually we teeter home with it across Max's lap on the back of the scooter, so this was definitely our safest transfer of Christmas tree to home.
It was like something out of a Nancy Meyers romcom, as we had old-school Christmas tunes on the stereo (which will now be the only thing we listen to until 2009) as Kate 'helped' us decorate (see below) with decorations I got from Ikea (for less than $20, all-in!). We colour code our tree each year - last year was red and white - and this year we decided to go patriotic, with a red, white and blue theme and the tree looks fabulous - regardez!
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