Week 3, part three, Work

Front of the Navy Yard museum

I realised I haven't said much about what I do during the week, when I'm not sight-seeing.

I work in the Navy museum's Education Department, which gives tours, home-school lessons, and summer camps, as well as hosting school visits. I work with a team of American interns who are all college students and History "majors" (History is the primary focus of their studies), some come from as far away as Los Angeles, California, but most are local, from Virginia, Arlington and Maryland. We write up lesson plans, using books and the museum's existing curriculum, we make up folders for the students and we set up experiments and equipment for the activities in lessons!

The last week saw the beginning of the first of the summer camps, based around the construction of an underwater ROV (remotely operated vehicle). Each day has a lesson (focusing on Naval history, e.g. how an underwater ROV uncovered the Titanic, or a reel of American satellite film during the Cold War) an activity (e.g. making "submarines" out of water bottles, coins and tape) and then the students work in groups to make their robots, with us assisting them.

The students, who range from about 9 to 15 years old, are sometimes accompanied by parents and relatives, sometimes not. A few of the "moms and dads" help out with the circuit boards because they're engineers or they have experience with electronics. Despite the fact that I haven't held a soldering iron in over 5 years, nor have I ever used a drill, I've really enjoyed helping each group with their project! It's incredible how much even the youngest students are capable of, watching them finally get to race their under water vehicles in a horse-trough was very rewarding!

Barry! Display ship (retired Destroyer) docked outside the museum.

A pretty unique surrounding to work in...

Army personnel regularly turn up just to see what's going on, or to look around the museum. Sometimes they observe lessons, or help out. Live music streams every morning as I walk past the Marine Barracks, I think it's a marching band which accompanies the raising of the flag or something.

2 Awkward moments whilst running the camp this week;

1. A 10 year old boy is playing on one of the guns in the museum, shooting at an imaginary enemy. "Who are you shooting at?" I ask, "the British of course!"he replies...
2. Some of the younger children seem to have trouble understanding my accent. One boy watched me give a safety demonstration only to ask at the end; "what are googles?". Now I say "safety glasses". In addition, it took about 5 minutes to clarify what the word "soldering" meant, because in the U.S it's pronounced "SAW-DER-RING". Also, petri dishes are pronounced "PEE-TREE" dishes. This is just like the "pipe-ettes" episode.

Week 2, part three

 

The above photo was taken a while ago. Since then it has been raining for days, monsoon-style. A few nights ago everyone's phones began to ring simultaneously, which was weird. It turned out to be an emergency weather alert, which continued from 3am until 6am (overriding "silent" and "meeting" settings) saying that several inches of rain were due in a very concerntrated region of the city.

 

 Thunder and lightning storms continued for hours, and although everyone told me it was nothing to worry about, I kept getting up and watching the pavements flood. The thunder was loud enough to wake me up, and the lightning illuminated the entire room, with the blinds closed. The good news is, there were no serious floods, just a lot of rain, unusual for this time of year.

 

Currently the weather varies between overcast and sunny intervals. The humidity is the main problem though, it hovers between 80-90%, meaning that the air feels heavy, and nothing dries, because water doesn't evaporate without a lot of effort (e.g. using a hairdryer to dry wet towels...). Seeing as Washington D.C was built on a swamp, the climare here is oddly tropical.

 

 

A lot of my posts have focused around cultural insights, thoughts, etc. I think I should talk a bit about other aspects of contemporary culture that I have witnessed. Me, some other interns, and their roomates decided to watch Sharknado a film so bad that it was good. Live sharks fall from the sky, tornados form in the Pacific (they form in the Atlantic in reality!) and people decide to leave houses (in which sharks clearly cannot enter) and enter streams where the sharks actually are. Oh, and sharks tend to live in salt water, not fresh water. The film negates science to show scenes of a woman in a bikini running along beaches, supposedly to outrun the sharks. Either way, the film was a great example of self-mocking modern American culture.

 

So this week I've seen the benefits of working on an active Naval base. Seeing people in official uniforms is cool, getting free ice cream (given out to everyone who works on the base "for morale") is even cooler. The best was listening to the cannon fire as part of the retirement ceremony for an Admiral. The number of cannon blasts (which made a booming noise that rebounded around the entire site) signifies the rank of the person retiring from service. It's something most civilians will never get to experience.

 

Interesting things I've learnt in the last few days;

1. In Washington D.C apartments cannot have more than 8 girls living in them without being inspected, due to concerns over illegal brothels. This explains the gender imbalance in all of the student/ intern housing here.

2. Americans call "crocodile clips" "alligator clips". I find this interesting because it's obviously the same concept as in England, with the teeth, but who adapted the concept first?

3. Squid is not Kosher because it doesn't have fins and scales. I guess this is obvious from the Old Testament, but I didn't put two and two together.

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.