Saturday

In honor of this first week of the 2007 Cherry Blossom Festival,* we walked around the in the dark last night and all around northwest downtown today. This is probably not classic cherry blossom tourism, but oh well. It was latish already when we decided to head into the District today, so we mostly haunted the length of 19th St. between Farragut and Dupont Circle. I like 19th: it's still very chic downtown DC, what with all the skyscrapers, but there are also interesting little places tucked in and around higher-falutin' tony dress-up urban meet-market destinations (unlike Georgetown, say, or even 6-10th Streets around Penn). There's the little panini place we discovered last Thursday on the corner of I (that's Karma*), the busy sushi and less-busy Indian we chose between last night (Kaz* and Aroma*), and many other types of places (a whole Malaysian block at M) along the gentle slope to P Street at the Circle and on into Embassy Row. There are also a lots of bloomin' cherry trees. After yesterday's whining about Asian fusion, I'm embarrassed to mention we ate at Nooshi,* an elision between a pan-eastern noodle bar and sushi restaurant. An extension of that embarrassment: I couldn't bring myself to order sushi so instead sat down to a bowl of quasi-Thai curry coconut seafood soup. It was good, as were the jasmine and oolong teas, but I think the highlight of the dinner was the chunky ginger ice cream. It was amazing, though maybe still somewhat too frozen when it hit the table. After dinner we wandered on up to the other side of Dupont, where Sunshine showed me a really neat used bookstore (Second Story*). Here eight-tenths of the layout is devoted to art, history, archeology, or some combination of the three. [Cavin]