Just A Bit of Rambling Goodness :)

Well, I had my first experience today actually looking "the part" of DC! I threw on my good ol' suit and headed to a conference that was held at The Capitol Hilton Hotel. The program that I am in here in DC is a program through my university called the American Studies Program. This is a program within the Council for Christian College Universities (CCCU) Best Semester programs. So the conference I attended was for the presidents of these christian universities that are affiliated with CCCU that get together once a year to basically just encourage each other and listen to speakers. Since we are students at these colleges and in the same place as this conference, our lucky butts got to attend the conference today to listen to the speaker whom of which was James Davison Hunter. Hunter is a Labrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and he's Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. According to his bio on his web page, he has written over seven books, edited three and has also published a wide range of articles, essays and such. His most recent book that he wrote is called "To Change the World: The irony, tragedy, and possibility of Christianity in the late modern world". This is the book that I have read several times for different classes in political science. He didn't speak much on his book other than a few quotes he took from it, and spoke to the presidents of the Christian universities about what exactly is Christian higher education. He broke his speech down by talking about "impact (the narrative of a Christian identity) and change". He concluded the speech by saying that "God is fully and faithfully present to us, so we need to be fully and faithfully present to Him, our neighbor and our world". Which is true is many ways. Then Jack (one of the guys here at ASP) and I had him sign our books :P

After Hunter's speech I had the pleasure of meeting Malone Universities 13th President, Dr. King and his wife Winnie. What a great couple! His wife is full of great enthusiasm, and was talking all about my outfit and hair. I loved her of course :P It was cool getting to see him while here in DC and I'm excited to see what he does for our university! 

Earlier today a friend of mine here at ASP and I got up around 6:30 and went and stood on the street corner at the bus stop for almost an hour. Sounds fun right? The reason for this was because we were planning on going to give blood at the national headquarters for the Red Cross. However, our bus never came. I am not exactly sure what happened but I learned two things from this: First, I will never depend on another person to figure out the bus schedule again. I will now look everything up myself. & second, that there is a McDonalds RIGHT down the street from me only 5 blocks! So I WILL be going to get myself a shamrock milkshake as soon as I'm done with these papers. Such a wonderful reward after all my hard work :) 

Yesterday we visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum is set up so you go from the top floor (floor 4) and go to bottom. Each floor is a different stage of the Holocaust starting before the years of World War II and ends at the "last chapter" of the Holocaust. It was a great museum, very interesting though hard to see. Highly recommended though! At the beginning of the tour you get an identification card and in it will be a person that lived during the Holocaust. You read the beginning short bio of the person and flip the page to read the next bit of information about the person as you get to each floor. It basically tells you what they experienced during the years that you go through in the museum. Then when you are done touring, you flip to the very last page and it'll tell you if your person survived or not. My person was a girl by the name of Liane Reiff who did survive the Holocaust because she had relatives that helped her and her family get to the United States. She actually ended up getting her doctorates degree in chemistry which I thought was pretty cool.

You can't read this of course, but it says "After the war, a memorial wall was constructed out of the fragments of several hundred tombstones that were unearthed in the Remu synagogues's cemetery in Cracow Poland. Built in 1562, the synagogue served the Jewish community of Cracow for almost 400 years. During the German occupation of Poland it's cemetery was used as a site for  mass executions. This is a casting of the wall. The original mosaic wall stands in the Remu synagogue's cemetery as a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust."

After I get these papers and bibliographies done I am going to plan my weekend! For sure a trip to Target is a must, and possibly the spy museum. And it looks like some people here are getting a group together to go to a Wizards game too which sounds like a lot of fun. So who knows what this weekend will hold! Happy Thursday everyone and have a great Friday! :)

Beautiful flowers we saw walking to the metro. A lady told us that they bloom in the winter time. We think they look like tie-dye :)

Also, fun fact # 2... There are over 500 escalators, and over 200 escalator repair man that are employed here in DC. (Not able to cite this statistic because Peter Baker (ASP Director) told me he read it in the paper).