This is cool!

      So far, so good! I have been enjoying my time here, thanks to our hosts, my workplace, and all of the learning opportunities Washington, D.C. has to offer. I arrived Sunday night, so today (Saturday) is my first day out doing something besides my internship. Right now I'm in the cafe of the National Museum of the American Indian, after having visited the Library of Congress and looking forward to my next stop, the National Air and Space Museum.

      I am interning at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. They are not a museum but rather a unit that puts on the 10-day cultural festival on the National Mall every summer that actually features people of various trades from the featured region (this year - Peru!). They are also the unit that houses Folkways Recordings, a record label that releases albums of folk music from around the world. My "project" as an intern is to assist in educational outreach leading up to this year's cultural festival. To do so, we will be contributing to a children's magazine that features different world cultures that will be publishing a Peru issue for us!

      Smithsonian people are very nice, and for many, their job is to keep learning and help others learn. The Smithsonian was created "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." I think that is why it is such a cool place to be. I was expecting everyone to be dressed fancy and for the atosphere to be more serious and somewhat tense, but at my unit, people like to joke around and they are so helpful to us interns. The work they do interests me a lot - probably because I got such a great internship placement as a Spanish Education and Cross-Cultural Studies major. (I'm having a workplace experience in which I'm using my liberal arts majors - it's great!)

      We couldn't have asked for a better host family. They are beyond kind, hospitable, and generous, which really helps make this experience near perfect. The one and only thing that I think could be better about this experience is the Metro and its occasional delays and congestion, which says a lot about how great things are going overall. I hope that other Whitworth students get to do this in the Januaries to come. In the words of a Whitworth professor with a pretty dry sense of humor - "You better do a good job. Don't screw this up - we want other students to have the same great opportunity that you do." It is a great opportunity indeed, and so far, everything seems to be going ideally.  

This is my fellow intern Jennifer and me crossing the National Mall, taking my supervisor's suggestion to "go visit a museum for a couple hours since it's Friday and good weather!"