philly

I had an action packed weekend! It started off with an incredibly fun food blogger potluck where I ate and drank about half my body weight in delicious treats and libations. Then it was a few hours of sleep and then a run to the Chinatown bus to catch the 9a to DC where I met up with some college friends. One friend, in his final year at law school in Illinois, was in town for a conference so I figured that I'd make the trip down to see both of them and drink [a lot].

We went to the Corcoran to see the Leibovitz and Adams shows. If anyone is a fan of photography and are planning to be in the DC area between now and mid-January, you have got to go see these two shows. A student ID gets you in for $10 – that's $10 total for both shows. I saw Leibovitz's Women show in 1999 and I thought this show, A Photographer's Life, 1990 – 2005, was even better. I think it was in the same stretch of galleries as the Womem show. Her show was a mix of personal photos printed in a more intimate size and larger scale portraits which she's been ultra famous for. There were so many famous images. Cover after cover, feature after feature. And I was surprised to see so many shots which were photojournalistic. A trip to Sarajevo. Shots from Ground Zero. Family snapshots. Travelogue photos with Susan Sontag. Mostly set in in groups of fours, these smaller family shots held their ground next to the poster sized celebrity shots.

I found the Adams show a disappointment. I wanted gigantic images filling my range of vision. What I got were mostly ~8"x12" prints. I wanted more. And after spending an hour or two in the Leibovitz show, I didn't have the patience to wade through the small prints. I checked out the gift shop and picked up a pack of 25 postcards of shots from the Leibovitz show for $14.95. The $75 pricetag for the book accompanying the Leibovitz show was waaaaay out of my price range – I had drinking to do!

We killed some time on the Mall throwing around a football and calling a fourth friend living out in Nashville on speakerphone like a bunch of idiots. But first, we passed by the White House which had it's normal protesters. BUT, there were also a dozen people playing, no joke, roller hockey right next to the front gate of the White House. You can see the distinctive columns in the photo above. Crazy.

I think throwing the football (straight from UofI's campus) on the Mall was the first time I had done anything athletic on the Mall. There are always people throwing around a disc, jogging or playing soccer there. I never got around to it while I was down there for school. It was fun. But it was time to head to VA to put my stuff down.

And what did we find in KT's new place in Rosslyn? A perfectly working 8-bit Nintendo system. And oh yes, there was a SMB/Duck Hunt cartridge along with the Duck Hunt gun. That's me shooting a duck ending a perfect round.

There were lots of food choices for dinner, but we settled on Edy's Chicken & Steak which was new to me, but a favorite of the ladies of the apartment. Wow is their chicken great. Dipped in some spicy salsa verde with yucca fries on the side and washed down with Inca Kola – perfection for under $9.

With a ridiculously full stomach, I was ready to drink. To U St we headed and in Bar Pilar we landed. It was really crowded. So to the back we headed where there was a photobooth. But it was broken. But I had my camera with me so a few snapshots were taken in the booth despite it being broken. We had a great time and I even spent well over an hour talking with a Navy officer who had just returned from the Al Anbar province of western Iraq where he was stationed overseeing a team of interrogators. It was incredible talking to him in the bar. He told us about what was going on on the ground there and a little bit of what he did. He's the first person I've met and spoken extensively with who has been in active duty during this war.

Drinks kept on appearing before me and I kept drinking them. We closed out the bar and ran into some old friends on the way out. They were dressed in foil jumpsuits as astronauts. It was crazy. 3a and we're on U St talking to guys in foil jumpsuits while getting the contact info of a Navy interrogator and reminiscing on DC of nearly a decade ago when we first knew it in college.

I had a blast.

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