Stories

Ni hao (hello) from sunny southern California. I have been at grad school for almost two weeks and yet it feels like years have gone by. Concordia University sits on a hill amongst the suburbs in Orange County, Calif., and I almost don’t want to leave this place for China! It is just so beautiful here; the sunsets rival Florida sunrises.

I spend my days in eight hours of Chinese class. There is so much to learn that it seems overwhelming at times. For instance, the Chinese word “ma” when said two different ways could either mean “mother” or “horse.” Imagine messing that one up in a conversation!

Yesterday was my 20th birthday, and I’ll admit that, as excited as I was to be spending my birthday in D.C., I was a little depressed that I wouldn’t be around my family or friends from school. To my surprise, this turned out to be…

Rather than broach one subject this week, I thought it would be interesting to take some short looks at a bunch of things that happened in sports over the last week or so.

As I’ve met people in D.C., I’ve made a point of asking them where their favorite places are to visit; I want to make sure that I experience the “true” D.C., whatever that is. Out of all the people that I’ve asked, only one person said the National Gallery of Art and only one person suggested the FDR memorial. In fact, many of the people I work with have never been to either of these places. This weekend I decided to pay a visit to those rarely suggested stops, the places ignored by most tours and forgotten by D.C.-ists. And I was surprised by what I found—by far one of the best days I’ve spend in D.C.

The first week in July, the Grocery Manufacturers Association will host C-suite executives (i.e. the highest ranking execs in a company: CEOs, CFOs, CIO and so on) from 50 major companies within our membership. This conference is called the Future Forces in Food (FFIF) roundtable.

The girls and I decided we had to continue our tour of the city. Our next stop: Arlington Cemetery. While this was not the happiest of places we’ve visited, it was something none of us were willing to miss. So Saturday morning, bright and early, we rode the metro to Arlington and bought tickets to do the tourmobile tour.