Cherry blossoms and partying for spring

I'm actually being misleading by titling this post cherry blossoms. I have not been down to the tidal basin to see the cherry blossoms yet. I know this is a big deal. However, I have seen the blossoms in all there glory elsewhere in the city. And I did go to the cherry blossom parade on Saturday.

Recently, I've decided I need more friends. While I love my housemates dearly, they are not always around. And it would be nice to have some people I feel comfortable calling to hang out with.

So when I got invitations to watch the cherry blossom parade and to go to a party I jumped at the chances. And coincidently this led me to stand in front of my house on Saturday waiting for the bus at both 8 am and 8 pm.

In the morning I took the metro downtown. It was completely packed. It was almost as bad as riding the metro on inauguration weekend. I met my friend by the American History Museum. He and his housemates had gotten there only a few minutes earlier than I had, but they had staked out a space on the curb. So we got to sit for 2 and a half hours, instead of standing, which was great. It was a clear morning with a blue sky, and not too cold, but it was very windy. This both chilled us, and made some of the poor parade walkers banners very hard to hold up.

This was really my first parade experience outside of the parade in Walla Walla's fair. I will say it was very different than that. There were many marching bands. One of them was from a city in Washington state I'm pretty sure is fictional as I've never heard of it. My friend told me that it was not really my place to call another city imiganiary, as he is pretty sure Walla Walla doesn't exist.

Other cool things in the parade were some very old cars, and even Alex Trebek as the grand marshal. All that means is that he sat on top of an old convertible and waived! Some of my highlights were a unicycle preforming group (which is my new life ambition, rehearsals start on monday), a military marching band and drill team, and some girls in amazing Scarlet O'Hara dresses.

Like any parade, people lined up to watch on either side of the street. About 50 yards from us, there was a cross walk that people were allowed to cross the street through. However, people did not want to cross at the cross walk, but instead tried to cross in the middle of the road, which was pretty inconsiderate and a little rude. So the poor police men who were crowd control, would chase the illegal street crosses down. About half way through the parade, they started catching people and sending them back to the side of the street they started on. While the police men couldn't have enjoyed this, the crowd around us would cheer when someone was caught and sent back. It was a good secondary source of entertainment.

After the parade we went to Five Guys, which is a DC burger institution. I'd never been before, and loooove hamburgers. It was pretty good, I will be back.
I went home, too a lovely long nap and then went to my coworkers party. She is also in a volunteer corps, and lives in a beautiful house with a total of 7 women. I bet my housemate Noah is thanking his stars he only lives with 4 women. It was a nice party, but I couldn't stay long as I wanted to make sure I caught the last bus home from Dupont.

All together I had a very lovely spring Saturday, and did feel like I made some connections on the making new friends front.