What a Weekend

I love weekends. Always so much to do. Some of those things are great and others are... well... not so good. But let's focus on the plethora of great things that happened this weekend and that would mainly be Saturday!! (Today I found some French magazines at a Border's in Georgetown... but that's only exciting to me because I'm a French dork.)
Saturday morning I went and fed the homeless at a soup kitchen which was kinda fun. In a shady part of town, but we went as a group with our RA, and it was during the day and not really all that shady, so it was all good. Then I headed for the National Mall to check out the National Book Festival. Authors and poets reading from their works and signing and everything!! I got some pictures for my mom. (She's an elementary school librarian.)
Ever heard of a little book called Holes? Disney made a movie of it too, with Shia Labouef. Well here's the man who wrote it: Louis Sachr.
Mom, to save any of these to your desktop right click on the picture and hit "Save Picture As". Here's Louis signing a book for his half mile long line of adoring fans. I'm really not kidding, the line was ridiculous!!!
I used to LOVE Arthur!! (Ok, I admit it, there's still a part of me that does.) But he was there too. So was the Magic School Bus and a whole crew of strange new generation PBS characters... when did I get so old!?
After the Book Festival I went to the National Gallery of Art and saw "Au Bonheur des Dames". It's a silent, black and white French film from the late '20s. And they had a group in from France to play the soudtrack along with it LIVE. It was so cool!!! The little black dialogue boxes that came up were in French and everything. It's even based on an Emile Zola book. It was just really cool. I felt uber-cultured sitting there watching it. Since I was in town around the time of the Millenium Stage events I went over to the Kennedy Center and I am SO glad that I did. They were having Asia Dance perform as part of the Dance DC Festival. All of the groups were amazing and fascinating, but the Indian ladies that performed second were very good, partly because of their facial expressions, which I don't think you can see on the video, and the group from the group from the Phillipines completely stole the show. Go to http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/archive.html# and watch the video from September 30th. The Philippines Group starts around minute 50 or so, if you want to fast froward. Oh, and did I mention that I got there early enough to get third row seats!!! It was SO cool to see up close! So that was my Saturday!

Moving back to add some pictures from the past week. I walked home along the Potomac on Friday evening and got some GREAT pictures of the monuments across the river. Not sure why there's only a shadow on the Washington Monument, but it's cool anyway.

I stopped at Theodore Roosevelt Island on my walk too. FABULOUS!! Great trails through woods and almost no people. Definitely going back when the leaves change. Great place for running. Took a dorky self portrait since I realized I haven't put many pictures of me IN Washington up.
Thursday I went to the Kennedy Center and saw Czechomor, the Czech rock group. Very good!
Wednesday was the book party at National Geographic. From left to right is Sylvia Plachy (photographer for the book and Adrien Brody's mom), Zainab Salbi (my boss and founder/CEO of Women fo Women), Lekha Singh (photographer), and the women in charge of National Geographic's Book Division.
That's my fellow intern, Mary Ellen. She's crazy like that, but that's why I like her. And I SWEAR that's water in her glass.
Oh, and I stumbled upon the Cathedral of Saint Matthew, the church JFK went to in DC.

That's it for this week. Laters y'all!