R&R: Arlington Part 1

I feel a bit sheepish about the last couple entries. It's hard to write as interestingly about experiences that aren't particularly novel to me. Or perhaps family events are just less harder to write about in an engaging way. I'm not sure the next few will be much better, but here's hoping. There will at least be lots of cute pictures of nephews (and other relations)!

Most of our time in Arlington was a whirlwind of visiting friends and family with a few errands thrown in. The main task of getting Grace's phone unlocked proved to be quite the headache. We were finally able to get it done with about two days of R&R left. Still, now she has a personal phone she can use in Dhaka and on all our travels the world over. I do find it interesting how much the ease and cost of getting a pre-paid SIM card as a tourist varies. Of the places we've visited recently, the rough ordering would be:

  1. Singapore. Hilariously easy, can be done at pretty much any corner store. Cheap. SIM cards come pre-loaded with numbers of a dozen local embassies, hospitals, police stations, etc.
  2. Dominican Republic. Pretty easy. Did it at the airport branch of a telecommunications company. Quite cheap.
  3. United States. Pretty easy, but fairly expensive. T-Mobile had by far the best prices but turned out to have really poor coverage. Next time I'm back in the US short term I'll opt for AT&T most likely, as they always seemed solid while I had them.
  4. Turkey. Bizarrely difficult. Even more expensive than the US. Number has to go through an activation process that takes several hours.

Anyway. Phone nonsense. I do find a smartphone to be an invaluable tool while being a tourist (directions and maps, on-the-fly translations, ratings of nearby food, etc.), though.

It turns out that we had way less time in Arlington than we would have liked. So many of our friends have ended up (or stayed, depending) in the DC area that calendar was pretty full, leaving less time spent with family. Luckily, though, Bruce and Joyce (Grace's siblings) were able to come up for a chunk of Memorial Day weekend.

I might actually digress here to talk about some work stuff I did while in Arlington. The timing worked out really well in that I was able to present at a conference session organized by my supervisor from my time at NIH/NIAID. It was a three speaker session and I was in the middle. Cutting down a roughly hour-long talk to twenty minutes is really difficult. I was also very nervous as I had neither spoken to such a large crowed before nor spoken back-to-back with much more experienced and accomplished presenters. Despite all that, I think my talk went fairly well (could have been better, could have been much worse) and the session as a whole went very well - there was a lot of audience engagement in the discussion portion. It was also pretty validating after all the employment hurdles in Dhaka.

Two days later I visited the FDA for an all-day visit/interview. I guess they do a faculty-style interview. All I know is it was a fairly long day: an hour meeting with the division (CDRH) directors, giving an hour talk, an hour in a group meeting, lunch, and then a series of 30 minute meetings with the team leads. At the end of the day I was "officially invited to apply" or maybe "invited to apply officially." I think this basically means an offer, though it's not quite so formal. The government is bizarre and the FDA is basically unable to hire people directly and must instead hire through a fellowship program initially and then transfer people into permanent positions. The same was true at the NIH. Unfortunately, this means lots of hassle preparing materials I thought I had outgrown my need for (such as official, sealed transcripts). I'm also unsure how I'll proceed if I get a more formal offer. Depends on how things end up going in Dhaka, I guess. It's very nice to know that I have options, though, or at least can anticipate having options soon.

I think I'll end here and just write this entry off as the completely uninteresting apology, cell phone discussion, and work information post. I'll put all the cute pictures in the next one.

 

 

 

R&R: Santo Domingo - Wedding!

Apparently Dominican weddings start a lot later in the day than American ones typically do. The ceremony didn't start until 7:15 PM, so we had a lot of time to kill beforehand. Luckily, we had a mission: Grace's boss (who served in the Dominican Republic previously) told her about a local jewelry maker who she had befriended. She even enlisted Grace's help as a courier to deliver a present to his wife. Anyway, turns out Norberto (the jewelry maker) was taking part in a recycling festival thing at a mall nearby (he makes jewelry from recycled aluminum). Grace, Maurine, my cousins Daniel and Simon, and I all headed out to investigate. It was pretty fun! Perhaps a bit more mall and less festival than we were hoping, but there was still some pretty cool stuff. More importantly, we met up with Norberto so Grace could make her delivery, pose for a picture, and buy a sweet necklace. Simon also almost bought a sword (from a different vendor) before deciding that it might not travel all that well. There was also a really cool, Machinarium-esque sculpture of a cellist that I liked but, again, probably not carry-on compatible.

The wedding itself was quite the experience. First up was just getting there: I was somehow entrusted with driving and tasked with following my uncle Monchi. Normally not a big deal (especially after some experience driving in Dhaka traffic) but made quite a bit more exciting by a torrential downpour which resulted in several inches (up to a foot, maybe?) of standing water on a bunch of the streets. Still, we made it to the church in one piece and just in time to sit around for an hour waiting for the ceremony to start (7:15? No, no, no. Much too early. More like 8:30.). Still, there were many worse places we could have spent an hour, as the church was beautiful (and around 500 years old, being part of the colonial district in Santo Domingo).

The arrival of the bride and the beginning of the ceremony was heralded by the arrival of a small army of photographers and their assistants. The wedding ceremony itself was very nice and completed fairly quickly. To our surprise, the priest then segued directly into a full Catholic mass. I'm not sure we left until around 10PM (and none of us had eaten, yet, as the reception was to follow). I don't think we were the only ones ready to move on, as communion was a brief affair with most attendees apparently choosing the imminent wedding cake over wafers.

The reception was at a nearby country club. It was absolutely gorgeous. Perhaps more importantly, delicious finger foods abounded. Unfortunately for the lamer attendees (read: pretty much the entire Crouch side of the family) the live band, while excellent, was really, really loud. A lot of the older folks retreated outside, though this was hardly a problem as it was very nice out after the earlier rain. At Grace's (right-minded) insistence, we got a few pictures of ourselves before the evening ended.

Rest and Recuperation: Santo Domingo!

One of the perks (or mitigating factors, depending on your degree of cheer) of being posted to a place like Dhaka is the opportunity for rest and recuperation (R&R) travel. From Dhaka, our R&R point is Sydney, which means the State Department will pay for our ticket there or, more excitingly, to a destination(s) of our choosing so long as it costs less. Pretty sweet, right? Well, it gets better. Congress, in all its infinite wisdom, decided that State Department travel should be booked on American-operated flights, when available. Now flying to Sydney from Dhaka on any old carrier is about $1200 or so. Flying on an American one is in the realm of $6000. Hurray protectionism! What this meant for Grace and I is that we could fly from Dhaka to Abu Dhabi to New York to Santo Domingo to Miami to Washington, DC to Los Angeles to Tokyo to Bangkok to Dhaka for vacation without spending anything out of pocket. Well, except for the part where flying standard economy is pretty much torture for me, so we spent around $1000 and a lot of time haranguing gate agents and flight attendants for seats that didn't make me want to die.

So anyway, our first destination was Santo Domingo for my cousin's wedding. The trip there was surprisingly not terrible. We flew Etihad from Dhaka to Abu Dhabi and then from Abu Dhabi to New York. The plane and our seats were both decent. The service was surprisingly bad. Though, like I think I've mentioned before, anything flying in or out of Dhaka is probably the worst plane in the fleet. Abu Dhabi was strange in that there's an outpost of the US Customs and Border Protection in the airport. So before boarding we had actually already gone through US customs and immigration. Strange. Unfortunately, this (or some other vagary of travel) resulted in our luggage being misplaced on the way to Santo Domingo. Not a huge problem, and one that thankfully got resolved in time for the wedding.

Arriving in Santo Domingo was pretty interesting. When arriving from the US it always seemed relatively chaotic, impoverished, and dirty. Arriving from Bangladesh made it seem like Switzerland. We were met at the airport by my family (including my nephews Sebastian and Gabriel, the latter whom I was meeting for the first time), which made the transition very easy.

I'm blanking on the exact sequence of events for the next few days. Most of it was just time spent hanging out with my extended family, including a dinner the evening we arrived. I managed to grab a few pictures with the "assistance" of Sebastian. Blurriness was an inevitable consequence of low lighting and an excitable two year old.

The next day started out (after an excellent, leisurely breakfast) with a trip to the botanical gardens. Had Grace and I been there alone I probably would have taken a lot of uninteresting pictures of palm trees. Instead, I just took pictures of Sebastian and Gabriel. We didn't spend too much time there before heading to my grandfather's (Abuelito) house for lunch. Gabriel was quite the hit with the household staff and was carted off almost immediately upon our arrival (to what I imagine was a mixture of concern and relief to Rachel).

We spent the evening at my cousin Pedro's bar: Bräu Marketbar. Excellent beer (not that I have anything against Presidente, but...) and a fantastic burger were enjoyed by yours truly (and many of my family members, though I did not share my burger). A very enjoyable time, though a combination of jet lag and the wedding the following day prevented us from staying out too late. I'll leave the next day for the next post so as not to tire (bore?) my audience excessively.

Istanbul: Day 8

This was our last day in Istanbul, but luckily our plane back to Dhaka didn't leave until late afternoon. We revisited Van Kahvalti Evi for the last time (in the foreseeable future, at least) which was both delicious and a bit sad (cereal just isn't the same). Snagged a picture this time.

Yum!

The rest of the day before our flight was dedicated to souvenir shopping. Turns out carpets and rugs are hella expensive. Maybe we can come back once Grace is an ambassador.