Bel & The City: May 2007

Monday, May 28, 2007

Bel & Washington DC: Part III

So, on my last day in DC, we just had time to walk around Georgetown.

bs.

After midday, I said goodbye to Mechi and took the chinese bus, back to NYC...

Hopefully she´ll be visiting NY in a couple of weeks so, we´ll meet again :)

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Bel & Washington DC: Part II

Our second day in Dc was exhaustingly fun!

We woke up early- again!- and visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was really hot! So after walking a few blocks we needed to get water! We bought some mineral water and entered the museum. We were going trough some sculptures and art works, when I noticed one of my phones was vibrating strangely.

I have two cell phones. One is my New Yorker cell phone that i use to make local calls, and then , I have my Argentinian cell phone, to talk with my family.

When I opened my purse, it turned out it was flooded! Both of my cell phones were submerged deeply in 6 cms of water in my purse! Unbelievable!

So, I went to the restrooms, empty my purse and pray for them to keep working...

Both of my phones were in shock and not working... after a few minutes, my New Yorker cell phone started working. The water didn´t reach it that bad since it was in an inside pocket. But the other one... wouldn´t even turn on.

I took the batteries off and hoped that the hot weather would work miracles...

I tried to relax and kept enjoying my day in DC!

We headed then to the FEDERAL TRIANGLE. We took a a walk by the waterfront and passed by the Roosevelt Memorial, Jefferson memorial, Washington monument, World War II Memorial, Korean Memorial, Roosevelt Memorial. It was exhausting! It was over 100°F, and we couldn´t keep walking.

We kept buying water to get hydrated. And then... we discovered some street vendors that had some lemonade ice creams that were just fantastic! Actually they were not ice creams... it was more like frozen lemonade... Just perfect, what we were needing to keep going...

The worse part is that we didn´t know there was a Motorcycle parade to commemorate Memorial´s Day!

The parade of Marching Bands and Veterans is sponsored by the World War II Veterans Committee and units people from all the country that take part in it. So basically it means people from everywhere comes to the parade! So it was almost impossible to reach the destinations

We had to walk tons of extra blocks to border the motorcycle parade and find access to the Memorial´s monuments...

I was so crowded! Thankfully, we had frozen lemonade providers everywhere!

We were exhausted and I couldn´t help taking my sandals off when we entered the museum... I just needed to feel the cold marble floor!

We made some funny pics in the entrance :) I felt I was gonna die!

So, we visited the National Gallery of Art and the Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Both were great. I´m a big fan of contemporary art, so I loved their collections :)

Then we managed to get to the White House just before the storm started...

It was what we needed... fresh water!!

Bel & Molitva

Ni oka da sklopim,
Postelja prazna tera san,
A život se topi

Lyrics translation: http://lyricstranslations.com/translated/marija-serifovic-molitva-prayer

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Bel & Washington DC: Part I

I love the DK Witness Travel Guides, so when I started to plan my trip to Washington for Memorial´s Day long weekend, I didn´t hesitate to buy one. I picked the Top 10 Places of Washington DC , since I didn´t feel like getting overloaded with information I was not going to read anyways...

Then I learnt they had in their website some of the information included in the guide, so it was easier to plan my trip at work on my free time.

Some night in late March, or maybe in April, when I started to feel lonely, once all my visitors left and had nobody else visiting me, I called Mechi, the girl I met just before New Year´s Eve,

We had exchange some emails after she left to Illinois where she was taking a semester, but then we lost contact.

So, one night while I was walking back fro work to my place, I phoned her. We chat and chat and we talked about our lives in the US, our trips, and our next plans...

It was great to know she was planning to visit DC as well! She was finishing her semester and was taking a month to visit friends and some other cities in the East Coast.

I had already booked a hostel for Memorial´s day Weekend, but she was planning to visit DC the weekend after. It was not hard to make her change her mind :) and reorganize her trips itineraries.

So... she ended up booking the same place, the same weekend and had loads of fun...

As part of the Summer Fridays Program of my company, I left the office early and headed to Penn Station to take a Chinese bus that ended up having the best schedule that fit my hours. The train was too expensive for my intern stipend. And the regular Greyhound -or even other Chinatown buses- would leave at sharp o´clock. But this particular company that left from Penn Station, would leave every 30 minutes.

Iwona and Pawel- his boyfriend that got an internship in NY and moved from Poland to be with her-were going to Washington as well. So we took the bus together. They were staying at same relatives´place, so we couldn´t plan our trip together...

So, here we were, in the bus, leaving to DC.

It took us ages to get there. The bus emergency windowshields kept getting opened once and again during the whole trip! And then another bus from the same company stopped working and we had to take some of their passengers, and wait for the next bus to take over the rest of the passengers.

What was going to take around 4.30hs, ended up taking around 6hs.

Next morning, Mechi and I walked up early and spent some time walking around Capitol Hill, and took a tour at Library of Congress.

I knew Iwona and Pawel were doing something similar so we called each other and decided to head to the Eastern Market together and Capitoll Hill Flea market.

It´s a shame we didn´t take pictures of the four of us together...

Then we split, since they were doing something else, and MEchi and I kept our plan and headed Old Downtown and saw Chinatown, and the FBI.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Bel & Bel @ Pastis

Is life a comedy or a tragedy?
Anyway, lately I had dinner in Pastis, wonderful restaurant and location for Melinda & Melinda´s movie.

http://www.pastisny.com/

Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Over a meal in a French restaurant, Sy (Wallace Shawn) poses a conundrum to his fellow diners: Is the essence of life comic or tragic? For the sake of argument, he tells a story, which the others then embellish to illustrate their takes on life. The story starts as follows: A young Manhattan couple, Park Avenue princess Laurel (Chloë Sevigny) and tippling actor Lee, throw a dinner party to impress Lee's would-be producer when their long-lost friend Melinda (Radha Mitchell) appears at their front door, bedraggled and woebegone. In the tragic version of what happens next, the beautiful intruder is a disturbed woman who got bored with her Midwestern doctor-husband and dumped him for a photographer. Her husband took the children away and she spiraled into a suicidal depression that landed her straight-jacketed in a mental ward. In the comic version, Melinda is childless and a downstairs neighbor to the dinner hosts, who are ambitious Indy filmmaker Susan and under-employed actor Hobie. Back and forth the stories go, contrasting the destinies of the two Melindas.