The District of Columbia: A Cultural Melting Pot

Columbus and Cleveland, the only two metropolitan areas I have lived in before coming to intern in Washington, D.C., have their fair share of Chinese restaurants, Irish bars, and general cultural diversity, but Washington is a truly cosmopolitan city. People from all over the world come here to work and live, because, in the words of my good friend Mike McCandlish, it is "the capitol of the free world!"

As many of my fellow Glenn Fellows have blogged, a group of us went to the parade in Chinatown celebrating the Chinese New Year. (2010 is the year of the Tiger!) The costumes and dances were beautiful. It was great to the see all of Chinese language schools and traditional dancing clubs represented in the parade. One of the things I love most about our country is that one can adopt American customs, yet still keep his or her ethnic heritage alive. My family loves to do just that and is very proud to be of Irish descent, so you can imagine how excited I was when Andrea and I went with our housemate Aislinn to an Irish bar in the Woodley Park area. Ireland's Four Provinces was a great place to hang out and listen to traditional Irish music (and the occasional Paul McCartney and U2 cover.) We loved the music so much that we asked the lead singer of the Sean Fleming Band to take a picture with us. The Dubliner, very close to our residence, is another great place to listen to traditional Irish music.

Learning about Finnish culture at the Embassy of Finland was a very enlightening experience as well. The Finnish people seem very peaceful, friendly and they are extremely intelligent (The Program for International Student Assessment found Finnish students to be the smartest in the world.) They also love to sauna, as do I. Another admirable characteristic of the Finnish people is their stewardship of the environment. The Finnish Embassy is a green building and the Finish government is committed to reducing carbon emissions to combat Global Climate Change, as evidenced by their ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and their leadership at the IPCC Copenhagen Climate Conference.

From the friendly Somalian taxi cab driver I had the other week to the Israeli student at the Policy Salon with Henry Precht, D.C. is full of people from each of the 50 states and all over the globe. Each have a great story to tell and can teach us a great deal about different cultures.

-Clare