Last Tuesday, Christopher, Chris, and I decided we were hungry for Mexican food and decided to try and find some. We looked up the nearest places on line and settled on a place called "Las Placitas" on 8th St. After walking over to find this place, we were satisfied with the location and noticed that there are lots of other restaurants around 8th, including a Popeye’s! The service was good and quick, put the food turned out to be mediocre. It wasn't necessarily bad, but it just tasted bland and very boring. I have a feeling I'm going to miss Texas cuisine while living in this city.
Work continues to go well. I was given my first project from the press secretary Wednesday, and spent most of the day assisting her doing research. In just a short amount of time, I feel like I've learned a lot about the office and have gotten pretty good at putting names with faces. Cash and I are also doing a very good job with our work and have already been recognized for it. One of the schedulers gave us a major project the first day and told us to have it completed by noon on Wednesday. We submitted it to her at 5 pm on Monday and she was very impressed with the speed and quality of our work. Things do get a little boring, however, when you complete your work well ahead of schedule. The office is pretty slow right now since the Senate has been out of session, so we should probably try to drag our work out a little more to keep from getting so bored. Our supervisor does let us use our free time to walk around the office buildings and Capitol to get our bearings and learn our way around, so we've been able to make good use of the down time and have become pretty familiar with our surroundings.
After work on Wednesday, the other UNT interns and I went to a dinner/reception hosted by WISH for all of their intern residents. The food was barbeque, which was decent, but definitely not Texas. Mercedes and Ricky weren't here yet, but the rest of us attended and had a pretty good time. We met other interns from Massachusetts, North Carolina, California, and several other states who are all working for members of Congress. We also met several international students from countries like South Korea, Vietnam, and even Australia. They're here in D.C. working for various firms and companies. Overall, I was really surprised at the number of interns that are housed by WISH.
By the end of week one, I wrapped up the research assignment that was given to me by the press office and was personally thanked by the press secretary, who said that I did a great job with it and found everything she needed. It felt really good to have completed my first major task successfully. I understand that what I researched is going to be a part of Senator Cornyn's next speech, and it was a really good feeling to know that I contributed something valuable which will be read and directly used by him.
Walking back from lunch one day last week, I walked right past the Secretary of the Navy and a 3-star Admiral! They were in a hurry, so I didn't get to speak to them at all, but it was my first "government celebrity" sighting in DC and I thought it was pretty cool. Also, I got to meet our military liaison this week, who is an active duty Navy NCO! His name is Doug and he's on loan to Senator Cornyn for the year from the Navy to answer any questions the senator has about military issues and help him work on any military-related legislation. He's a really great guy interested in talking to me about the Navy and my plans for becoming a JAG and will be yet another great resource for me in that career pursuit. I think Senator Cornyn's office was exactly the right fit for me and where I needed to be! D.C. has been great so far and I really like it here. The office and the people are great and I really have to say that I enjoy my job. I was initially thinking that I would be pretty lonely until Mercedes arrived, since she is the only one I knew before NTDC, but I'm impressed with how quickly I've formed friendships with the other interns and how well we're all getting along.
Last weekend I returned home to pick up the rest of my things and bring everything back to DC with me. The trip was pretty uneventful, but I enjoyed getting to see my family and tell them all about my first week in DC in person. It's weird to think that it was cheaper for me to fly home and get the rest of my things than it would have been for dad to ship them to me with FedEx. Benefits of having a father who's an airline pilot! Coincidentally, I wound up riding next to one of Senator Hutchison’s (the senior senator from Texas) staffers on the flight to DFW, so we got to talk about life in DC and working for Congress.
I returned to DC on Sunday night and Mercedes arrived the same day. I was excited about this because Mercedes is a friend I’ve known for a long time. While I’ve gotten to know the other interns and we’ve gotten along really well, it’s nice to have someone here that I know well and have an established friendship with. Monday was MLK Day and our offices were closed. I used the time to show Mercedes around Capitol Hill and do some shopping for groceries. We toured the National Mall and went over to the National Archives. Inside the archives, we saw a lot of cool stuff, but nothing as incredible as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. It’s really powerful to see these original documents from the 18thcentury, preserved in pressurized glass cases and guarded around the clock. I can’t describe how incredible it is to stand in front of a document that was written by the hand of Thomas Jefferson in 1776!!! Although, I will say that I was surprised at how faded and worn it is. The Constitution is in relatively good shape, but the Declaration of Independence is hardly legible at all. The display room also looks nothing like the one in National Treasure and I concluded (after some brief surveillance) that it would be much harder to steal this document than Nicolas Cage makes it seem!
On Tuesday, Cash and I spent the entire day in Capitol Tour training. Learning the history of the US Capitol is really interesting, but spending the whole day in tour training gets really old really fast. We did learn a lot and became proficient with the layout and history of the building and I’m now qualified to give guided tours of the building. Wednesday we got quite a surprise when Claire, one of the Staff Assistants for Senator Cornyn, informed us that we would be giving our first tour. A couple of VIPs were in town and Cash and I were asked to give them a tour on behalf of the senator, a day after we did our training (talk about learning fast). Fortunately, the tour went really well and we seemed to remember just about everything. Our guests were very pleased and impressed and we served our office well. What a relief! Haha.
Two other interesting things happened this week. First, our third intern from the University of Texas (Kris) arrived and started work on Tuesday. He’s pretty cool, though he’s a little behind the curve since he’s starting late. Since Cash and I have already established a good working rhythm, we’ve had to work to incorporate him into what we’re doing. We’ve also been given most of the responsibility of training him, since we’re already trained. Also, while Cash graduated in December and I’m graduating this May, Kris is only a junior and has about 2 years left of school. He’s much younger than us, but I’m really impressed that someone so young is doing a Congressional internship already. Also, unlike Cash and I, Kris is taking a full 12 hours of classes at the Georgetown campus in addition to doing his internship. I can’t imagine how difficult that must be and am very glad that I’m not an intern from UT, which apparently makes all of their interns do this. Anyway, I think he’ll fit in just fine once he catches up and having him on board is going to lessen our workload even more. The second thing that happened was watching protesters have a run in with Capitol Police. We happened to be over at the Capitol building as thousands of protesters showed up from the Occupy Movement to try and occupy the Capitol Hill. We knew something was going on when a dozen USCP officers passed us carrying handfuls of flexi-cuffs. Curious, we followed them at a distance outside and saw them start to corral protesters off the sidewalks and streets. The protest didn’t last long and was much less eventful than those that occurred last year, but it was still interesting to see in person.
This weekend, it got pretty cold and we had a decent snow fall. I stayed inside most of the weekend and caught up on TV shows thanks to Hulu and Netflix. Other than one outing to go to church Sunday night, I pretty much spent 48 hours inside the apartment and stayed warm. Fortunately, the heater in our apartment seems to be eternally stuck on “hot” and we have no control over the internal temperature. While this does get annoying when you wake up at night sweating, it was very welcome this weekend.
Speaking of church, we did finally find a place where I think we will be very happy and I'm excited to tell you about it. Let me first back up and explain a bit about my situation. I am very blessed that out of the 5 other interns from UNT, 3 of them are practicing Christians (2 protestant and 1 catholic) It's nice to have fellow believers interning with me and this will be good for my spiritual life while I'm here in a very secular city. Unfortunately, finding a church in this city is not easy. Most of the churches here on the Hill are very old and are either Roman Catholic or very old-school Baptist or Methodist (old-school meaning hymnals only, pews, and long winded sermons). While there's nothing wrong with any of that, it’s just not a worship environment that I'm real comfortable in and not what I'm looking for. Also, these churches also offer nothing in the way of college or young adult ministry, so there is really nothing there for us. The other churches in the area are so "liberal" and "progressive" that they are completely un-Biblical. Danny described them as having a philosophy of "Let us make God in our image" and that about accurately sums it up. Anyway, after much online searching and consulting friends from Southwest Christian Church in Fort Worth (the church I grew up in) and The Village Church in Denton (my current home church), we found out about Frontline.
Frontline is a split off church of McLean Bible Church designed specifically to target young adults and college students. They are a multi-campus congregation with locations all over northern Virginia and southern Maryland. The campus closest to us is Frontline Silver Spring in Silver Spring, Maryland. It's about a 15 minute subway ride combined with about 15 minutes of walking, making the total commute about a half hour each way. While this is not real convenient, it's not bad at all and totally worth it. We fell in love with the place right away and just felt like it was where we needed to be. The church meets in an old theatre downtown, which gives it a feel very unlike any other church I’ve been in. The campus pastor's name is Mike and he's a very friendly, funny, knowledgeable, and spiritual young man with a passion for teaching God's word and reaching the southern Maryland and DC communities. I got to talk to him a little while after the service and was very impressed. As for the service itself, it's almost exactly like the Village and made me feel very at home. The music is all contemporary (mostly Hillsong) and the same songs we sing in Denton. I would say around 80% of the congregation is under the age of 30 (exactly like the Village), so I felt very comfortable being around people my age who are in the same life stage as me. What I really like is that the Silver Spring campus is small (only around 150 people), making it easy to meet and engage people. You don't feel like you're lost in a large crowd or fading into the background and everyone was very friendly and inviting. Their theology and teaching is solid and Biblically based and the church just feels like a very welcoming, comfortable place. I'm very glad to have found the Frontline Silver Spring community and I think the other interns and I are going to really enjoy worshipping and serving with them this semester while we're away from our home church. (Though I'm still podcasting Matt Chandler every week on iTunes, haha).
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