Of Washington

We're approaching the end of two weeks of classroom instruction at the Foreign Service Institute, a locale loved and reviled by Foreign Service Officers the world over. Two weeks is kind of a nice span of time to be there, long enough to enjoy the relaxed pace of life and the lack of actual responsibilities or deadlines, yet short enough to not tire of those advantages.


Washington, for its part, is ok. It is America, so it's got that going for it. Good beer, passable Thai food (although were I here with a car, I would do more to enjoy Northern Virginia's only redeeming quality - the great ethnic food), diversity. The picture immediately above was actually taken on my first day back in DC - I momentarily thought that the fashion sense of the women of Latvia was actually reflecting some worldwide trend. It turns out that the above outfit, which could have been fairly normal in Riga, was something of an outlier for Washington. We'll leave evaluation of whether that is a positive or negative to the reader.