As I write this, I am
sitting in Washington DC (not quite home... but close), where the temperature this evening will dip into the
teens during the latest polar vortex to hit the east coast. Though it’s been less than a month since we
left Belize, the heat and humidity are already a distant memory.
After packing up and
shipping off most of our stuff (except for the two suitcases each that we will
now be living out of for the next several months), we spent our last week in
Belize doing some of the things we loved most – having dinner parties with friends, dogsitting, and taking one last trip to the Belize Zoo to bid farewell to the tapirs, jaguars, and
macaws.
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| Last visit to the tapirs and spider monkeys at the Belize Zoo. |
My last day at Embassy
Belmopan was February 8, and on February 9, we flew back to Washington DC where
we’ll be for a couple of months while I do some training in advance of my next
assignment in Zimbabwe. We arrived at
our apartment in Arlington, VA, and within 18 hours, we left again for a
week-long training course in Shepherdstown, WV.
In case we had any disillusion as to whether we were still in the
tropics, Day 1 of training started two hours late due to a snow delay.
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| Some final scenes from Belize, including this random horse who was grazing in front of our house one day. (Our Belize house is on the other side of that orange wall.) |
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| And the main drag in Belmopan. |
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| And our last glimpse of the jungle as we flew out of Belize City. |
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| Goodbye, Caribbean Sea... |
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| ...and hello Arlington apartment! A friend from my Foreign Service orientation class who is living in our same apartment building - in cahoots with Andrew - provided this stellar welcoming on our apartment door. |
We returned to our Arlington apartment at the end of the training week, and within 18 hours, we left again – this time for a long weekend
in New Orleans with several friends from my Foreign Service orientation class
who have all recently finished their first assignments. One of them is from New Orleans and
her family is part of a “krewe” that participates in a Mardi Gras parade every year. It seemed the perfect place for us to hold a
reunion, celebrate the fact that we’d all survived our first tour, and blow off
some steam. It did not disappoint. We returned to Arlington on February 18 and
finally spent more than 24 consecutive hours in our apartment for the first
time.
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| A jazz band playing for us at a restaurant in New Orleans. This is apparently the only photo I took from that weekend. That may be for the best... |
Our Arlington apartment is more or less in the same
neighborhood as where we spent about 6 months in 2016 before heading to
Belize. Despite the weather being at or
below freezing most of the time we have been here, we’ve managed to venture out
to explore our neighborhood a few times.
We have a Whole Foods right across the street! And a Trader Joe’s about 2 blocks away! Oh, the civilization! After spending the last two years having to
drive to at least 3-4 different stores to get our groceries, the ability to
walk across the street and find wine, cheese, meat, and vegetables all in the
same place is a true luxury.
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| Our new digs. |
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| And our new snowy view (during last week's snowstorm). We're definitely not in Belize anymore. |
We’ve already had
our first visitor! Wendy, my friend from
college, came down from Connecticut to stay with us for the weekend, and Wendy
and I had an amazing day playing tourists in DC.
The day was cold – but dry – so we put on our layers and ventured
out. We walked the length of the
National Mall visiting many of the monuments, checking out several museums and
other places of interest, and ending the day by meeting up with Andrew at one
of our favorite restaurants in DC. There
were no lines anywhere, so we were able to just walk right in to the museums –
and even got in on a tour of the Capitol without a reservation and without waiting
for more than five minutes. Word of
advice: If you ever want to see DC without all the crowds, bring your long
underwear and a coat, and come in early March.
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| An epic day playing tourist with Wendy. |
And so now we have
pretty much settled in to what will be home(ish) until we get back to Portland in mid-April. Feels good – albeit cold – to be back.
