Week 1, part one

View from the living room of the apartment. I like looking out for yellow schoolbuses and brightly coloured taxis, and anything else stereotypically American. Between the houses of 4-6pm the traffic outside the window comes to a complete standstill as senators, congressmen and other officials attempt to get out of Capitol Hill.


 

Since arriving I've managed to set off both the fire alarm and shut down the internet access for the entire house, so that's the apartment I share with my roomates, the apartment above us, below us, and the guy who lives in the basement (not creepy at all...no I mean seriously, it's not creepy, he explained it's because he didn't want to share a room and so the basement was the only option).

I turned off the internet by unplugging what I thought was a hairdryer, but was actually the router. Within seconds I found a massive sign on the wall, reminding residents not to touch any of the internet ports, and within minutes a maintenance guy appeared out of nowhere on the doorstep of the apartment. In my defence, US plugs are very different from UK plugs, also in my defence is my English accent, e.g. discussing London with the maintenance guy until he stopped being so increduclous ("why is there a hairdryer plugged into the ethernet port?") and said "you sound just like Kate Middleton" (not true).

As for the smoke alarm, that's a mystery, considering I was cooking pizza at the time, but it wasn't burning and there was no smoke. I like to think of it as a deliberate tactic to introduce myself simultaneously to the entire building, I mean, no one's going to forget who I am. (Admittedly most people "knew" who I was before I arrived, I'm "the British one", "the one from Oxford college"). Everyone else in the building is American, which doesn't mean anything when you consider the culture difference between those from LA, Chicago, Texas, New Jersey, but suddenly makes (according to them) no difference when you say the words "July 4th".

So at work today I learnt 3 main things;

1. People like British accents
2. Bonus points for living "near London" and identifying scenes from Oxford from the "Head of Interns"' desktop caldendar
3. The Washington Navy Yard is a city in itself, it has it's own Subway, food court, transportation (well, a retired Destroyer ship, casually docked outside my office). I found this out the hard way after 20 minutes of aimless wandering, having gone through security checks and being handed a map by a guard with a gun. (Though my Texan roomate reminds me that she has at least 20 guns in her house, just saying)

Still getting used to the casual but bureaucratic workings of America (e.g. an air hostess will happily refer to you as "honey" and joke about Beyonce concerts, but then she'll come around and announce that everyone on the plane has to put down their window shutters so that "people can have a better view of their movie screen". Seriously?) My favourite thing is this room is the museum which has a sign on the wall to remind people that it can only hold a certain number of people. I mean, it is a room after all, what do people expect, an infinite amount of space? Isn't a room, by definition, a closed-off area? Maybe my mind just doesn't follow American logic.

*vocabulary learnt today; "yuppy" = young professional, usually used with negative connotations of being self obsessed and concerned only with wealth and career plans. "Go-phone" (a Pay-as-you-go phone), "pipette" (yes, I know what a pipette is, but Americans say "PIE-PET" so I didn't understand what anyone was talking about for around an hour until someone found one...I kept thinking they were talking about some kind of small, furry animal, until they described cutting it and submerging it in water as part of a craft activity, which I thought seemed out of place for a children's afternoon activity.