First Day!

Yesterday, my mom and I left the house at about 1pm to drive down to DC. We made it all the way down without much traffic, but got jammed up a bit once we got to the hotel. We're staying at the Renaissance M Street Hotel, and it's really nice here. I met a lot of the people that I've been talking to on facebook from the CLS group for the past couple of months and it felt a bit awkward at first to "re-meet" someone you sort of already met online.

Bernie, a friend of mine who I met at the Temple Japan campus in Tokyo was in Maryland visiting family, and we got to hang out a bit. We went to this Peruvian place for dinner, and it was absolutely delicious. After dinner, we met up with some of the other CLS participants and went to Georgetown to see the campus. It looks really nice there, and is quite close to our hotel.

Afterwards, Meng, Veronika, and I were walking Bernie back to the subway, and right after we dropped her off, this woman stopped us to ask for directions. We didn't know our way around too well, but she wanted to go to Georgetown, which is where we just came from, so we sort of knew how to direct her. She threw us off our groove a bit, and we overshot our hotel a bit on the way back. We finally got back to the hotel, and just crashed.

This morning we had breakfast at 8, and then a full day of orientation. Met a lot more of the last minute people whose planes didn't arrive until last night or this morning. One of the Turkey CLS groups are also with us in the hotel now, so we got to meet some of them at breakfast and morning orientations. They answered a lot of our questions, and seemed really interested in helping us find jobs after we finish CLS and graduate from college. That's really good, considering the economy and how hard it is to find a job as a liberal arts major. One of the panelists was actually from Philadelphia, and went to Girls High School. She's served in the Foreign Services for years, and now has a good job with Public Diplomacy.

NEXT MORNING WE LEAVE AT 5:00AM TO DULLES!