first week in DC

on the first day of my internship i met the intern coordinator of my museum and the 5 other interns and we got a tour of the museum on the mall (where i'll be interning, along with 2 other girls) and the one in suitland (where the other 3 girls will be). my museum is actually one of three under the same name - mine is on the mall and has about 1% of the collection on display; the one in NYC is smaller but has lots of live performances and is there because the original owner of the collection required that some stay on display in his hometown; and the suitland site is where the rest of the collection is held. we went on a tour of the collection storage, and it was pretty incredible. there were thousands of amazing artifacts from aboriginal communities all over the western hemisphere. my top favourite artifacts are the boats: birch bark canoes, skin kayaks, reed boats, etc. so incredible. anyway, during our tour of the mall museum, we joined in on a little party that was happening on a balcony overlooking the mall and the capitol building. i felt like we were on the first episode of a season of project runway, and heidi klum and tim gunn were about to come out and tell us about our first challenge.

i spent the next few days getting paperwork figured out and getting settled in my internship. i've been placed with the cultural interpreters, so my tasks are to work with the education department's teaching collection; get trained on the family activities and start presenting some of them; and to come up with a presentation on an indigenous community of my choice. on my second day, i found that the teaching collection (about 400 articles, separate from the museum's real collection) was not as well organized as it could be (ie. each artifact had its own excel sheet, but there were no accession numbers on any of the articles AND there was no searchable database linking all the info), so i spent most of my first week making up a simple database and then entering all the data from the separate sheets, so that my coworkers can search the collection by material, culture group, social usage of the object, type of object, etc.

on my second saturday in DC, i went to the national zoological park and saw giant pandas, flamingos, giant tortoises, and lots of other neat animals. i got a milkshake at the johnny rockets at union station and silently reminisced about times kelsey and i would go to the one in west ed in our west ed phase. i ate supper in the residence cafeteria with a girl named mary, who is from edmonton and here through the same program that i am (but at a different museum). i usually eat most of my meals in the cafeteria by myself. i think the other girls in the residence might think i am a serial killer because that's what people think about other people who just like being alone ("yeah, she was strange. always kept to herself."). whatever. anyway, mary and i met up once in edmonton before we came here, and there's a good chance we'll hang out in edmonton once we return, and she's very bright and i like her company when she's around. she invited me to watch "dirty dancing" with her and some of the other girls in the tv room, sort of as a way to help me get to know new people. ha. i said yes, because i wanted to get out of my room. the DVD player wasn't working, though, so we ended up watching a VHS of "sliding doors" with gwyneth paltrow. it was an interesting concept, but not a very good movie. i sort of rage out at movies that have relationships i don't believe have any real foundation. this movie was full of that.