Thanksgiving Wrap-Up (A Little Late)

So, as usual, I'm not blogging until Thursday evening. Unfortunately, this week it has been nothing but pure laziness that has kept me from it. Thanksgiving was a lot of fun. Three of us from the program went to my friend Erin's house in south Jersey to celebrate with her family. The food was great, a very traditional Thanksgiving dinner, which I really appreciated. Erin's family was fantastic, and so open with their open and their food. The night after Thanksgiving (Friday) we went to Atlantic City, to allow Matt and I to get our first taste of gambling, as both of us have turned 21 this semester. I've got to say, it was a lot of fun. It was like the casinos you see on TV, not at all like the Dog Track or the Diamond Jo. The best part was, I won $10.50!! After we came home on Saturday, I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see an exhibition by an artist from Maquoketa. The exhibition consisted of over 100 portraits of Maquoketa residents (Maquoketans?) and a soundtrack of them talking about life in semi-rural Iowa. In a strange way, it almost made me feel like I was back home for a little bit. Sunday, for whatever reason, I couldn't motivate myself to do much of anything in terms of school work, despite kind of needing to. I think it was a combination of the busy weekend and a slight sense of being ready to be done with the semester. As much as I thoroughly enjoy being in DC and working in the Braley Office, I'm ready to get back home and be a kid again, at least as much as a 21 year old man can be a kid.
At work this week, I've been concentrating on entering mail and answering the phones. I wasn't given a letter assignment, I guess as a gift for it being my last week in the office, but also because we really need to try to knock some of the incoming mail out of the way before I leave the office internless. The only real out of the ordinary thing this week happened yesterday. I tried to get into the House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on the Iraq war that Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates were speaking at. Unfortunately, I was not able to get into the room as it filled up too fast. To make matters worse, I got completely and utterly lost in the Rayburn House Office Building for like 30 minutes. In my defense, Rayburn is not the most logically designed building. As far as I can tell, some of the floors don't wrap around the whole building, and when you take certain elevators to what you know should be the right floor, you wind up in the parking garage. Beside all that, though, this has been a pretty nice last week.
We've also been wrapping up classes this week. Next week is finals for all three of my classes, though my Wednesday night history class is a take home final that we are just turning in on Wednesday at dinner with our professor. I'm relatively excited about the classes winding down. They've been very interesting, but far from the somewhat easier classes you might expect from a semester abroad. Today, our policy visit was to the World Bank, which was significantly more interesting than the International Monetary Fund last week. Don't get me wrong, I have no intention of working at either, but if I had to pick one, it would be the World Bank. We walked to Union Station after that, since it was a beautiful day and we had some time before class. It was nice to take in a fairly large chunk of the capitol area again before we start to run out of time. I guess that's about it for this week. My goal is to post on Sunday and then again next Friday before coming home by mid-day Saturday.

Until then,
Jes