St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day. We kicked-off festivities by missing the annual parade downtown at 7th Street. Actually, we just realized we'd missed it today: revelers had actually paraded the week before. Why? I have no idea; but this certainly explains the great number of Irished-up rowdies seen on the metro between Smithsonian and the zoo last Saturday. We ended up heading to the Smithsonian's Ripley International Gallery* to see an interesting exhibit on the Vietnamese Diaspora called Exit Saigon.* The set-up was small--it just lined one hallway--and featured photos and other documents from the fall of Saigon in 1975, on through various Vietnamese refugee camps, and all the way to modern examples from several prosperous Vietnamese-American enclaves around the US (like our very own neighbor, the Eden Center). My favorite part was the mock-up restaurant counter kiosk that sported typical menus from various restaurants as well as perfect little mise-en-scène dioramas: chopsticks and Asian soup spoons arranged around placemats dominated by large phở bowls in which laminated color copies of the soup were carefully placed. After the exhibit, I was hungry. Sunshine and I then split-up for a couple hours to do our own things. I ate at Qdoba and watched a movie. Sunshine went to several extra museums buying me Christmas presents. What? Well, back in December, while leaving Monterrey, we decided that we'd postpone celebrating Christmas, since time was tight, the car was tightly-packed, and we weren't spending the holiday together, anyway. So we opted to celebrate Christmas on Valentine's Day instead--how could we have known we'd be really sick that week? So we finally got around to it on St. Paddy's. I got a number of museum books (giant squids! ancient grave robbers!), a magnet, and a couple Jamieson shots before midnight. [Cavin]