My love affair with New York continues but as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder so it was time to take a little time apart as I jetted off (took the train) to Washington DC last weekend. I went with my friend Dara and a couple of her friends for a weekend of cultural (and not so cultural) activities.

It started, as all good weekends do, with cwoffee and heart-shaped Valentine’s doughnuts from Dunkin’ Doughnuts’ (it seems America has changed me…). The temperature has plummeted over the past few days so we headed to the place where it’s summer all year round – the Botanical Gardens! Someone should definitely consider opening up a spa here…

I found my ideal chandelier…

Refreshed, we headed to the museum of American History – DC is the land of museums after all! We decided to do a tour which started with everyone saying where they were from – I quickly regretted saying London when our tour guide said “I’ll go easy on the revolution against the British then”. The rest of the tour continued with the odd pointed comment like “this is the cannonball that the British fired which sunk our ships” (see below) or “this is the tax the British used to steal our money…” – it was all done in good humour but I certainly got a few suspicious looks from the other participants.

I also enjoyed the Julia Child exhibition, especially this advert although I’m sure it would cause uproar if published today…

Of course, we weren’t going to let Valentine’s Day go unmarked so we bundled up (see below) and headed out into the snow to a table booked for 5 at Georgetown’s most romantic restaurant.

It was a shame they held back on Valentine’s decorations… you could barely even tell what the occasion was…

After charming the waiter into giving us all Valentine’s monkey toys with our dessert, we continued our night with Karaoke and a dive bar where the rum came in plastic mustard bottles, but who were we to complain…

It was straight to brunch (where else?) the next morning where we devoured red velvet pancakes, scrambled eggs, mac and cheese and all the other brunch delights, accompanied by our monkeys of course!

With temperatures hovering around -5 degrees C and being museum-ed out from the day before, we just went to the cinema in the afternoon (I’m sure you can guess what we saw, and no, it’s not worth seeing) and then had a final farewell brunch on Monday morning (thank you, Presidents’ Day!) of salmon tacos, a healthier contrast to the rest of the weekend!

Have a great rest of the week!