I’m slumming around Washington DC this week with plans of heading home on Friday. Our team is holed up in a building near Navy Yard, which smells. Not the building; I mean, the whole area. Outside it smells like a combination of fertilizer and dead fish. I’m pretty sure I smell too. It’s so humid here that every time I step outside I am instantly dripping with sweat. I have taken to wearing two shirts this week to hide my sweaty armpits. That of course is just making me sweat more, but at least the outside layer stays dry. Mostly.

Yesterday we took the metro a couple of times, to and from dinner. While buying a ticket and figuring out the metro system is kind of a pain in the ass, it beats paying $30 for four bites of salmon and $9 each for watered-down drinks back at the hotel. Even on per diem, that ain’t right.

Last night we had dinner at the Veranda Restaurant. For an appetizer we had Saganaki, which according to the menu is “Flambéed Greek Kefalograviera Cheese”. The waiter brings the cheese out in a frying pan and then ignites the entire dish with his lighter. Unsurprisingly, fried-cheese is pretty tasty. For dinner I had the chicken breast, which is served on a bed of rice and sausage. Again, unsurprisingly good. They also had sangrias for $4 which I didn’t think were terrific, but at least they weren’t $9 glasses of rum and coke and coke and coke.

After dinner our friend David walked us over and showed us his house, which is over a hundred years old and decorated beautifully. In the living room he has red walls with ornate blue trim. I knew David was a great photographer but I did not know about his 20,000+ vinyl record collection, which he recently had to relocate from the upstairs room to his garage because they were becoming too heavy for the floor. I’m glad we didn’t start digging through them because I would probably still be there.