Things I am Learning about Living in the City

1. Everything in Alexandria closes at 10pm on Mondays. If you should happen to have run out of cream for your coffee, or want some milk for cereal, you are shit-outta-luck, fella. I know it may seem like you should be able to just walk down the street and buy some, now that you live in a city, but this is a vicious lie. Even if you walk 10 blocks to the end of King street, you will not find a single restaurant, bar, or deli that is still open, so don't even bother.

2. Simply being in the city makes you more productive. You will find yourself working at odd hours, when just a week ago you had trouble getting yourself to work for an hour. You will spontaneously think of great ideas, and then actually sit down to work on them instead of putting them off for weeks until you can't really remember what you got so excited about in the first place.

3. Just being in the city will not automatically make all of your dreams come true. You will still feel lonely sometimes. You will occasionally wonder when life will move forward. But unlike living in the country, where you have endless silent hours to try not too think such thoughts, in the city you will quickly find something else interesting to capture your attention. Feelings of loneliness, frustration, or confusion will move from close to overwhelming to merely visible in the background. After all, there's that new coffee shop you haven't visited yet, and you really wanted to go spend a few hours in the bookstore this afternoon...

DC bound

So much has happened in the past few weeks that I've been putting off blogging about it because I haven't really known where to begin. But I know better than that :). So, I'm going to break things down a bit and get caught up in smaller updates rather than one epic one. Today's is about moving to DC:

As some of you know, but some of you may not, I moved into a townhouse in Alexandria last week, and I've been loving every minute of city life so far. The owners of the house are friends of my parents, who spend every summer with their extended family in France, so we're house sitting for them until some time in August. Which works out to several months of rent free living in DC :).

The area itself is really cool. We're about 3 blocks from King Street, the main drag in this area, which is full of great restaurants, little shops, a book store and movie theater, etc. After a long walk with mom and dad a few days ago I discovered that there's even a cool kind of harbor/park area on the Chesapeake at the end of King Street. I'm sure I'll be spending more time there over the summer once the weather warms up.

I've never really lived in a walking district like this before, but it turns out that I absolutely love it. I've started going out for strolls to get coffee and wander around, just to be on the sidewalk with other people. I've also started taking my laptop to work at the Cosi down the street instead of staying in the house like I usually do. It's amazing how hungry I've been for this kind of thing.

I haven't really begun connecting with people yet, or exploring some of the activities that I want to do while I'm here. I'm treating it like a hot tub, easing my way in and enjoying every minute of it. It will be interesting to see how things change once I'm spending more time with friends here.

So that's my DC snippet. Here are some King street pics I took to give you a feel for the area. I'll write about some other recent life developments soon.