It’s the anniversary of my move to Washington DC! One year ago today, Sam and I boarded a plane, each of us having checked luggage to bring just enough to be able to camp out in an apartment while we waited for our worldly possessions to be shipped across the country. We had about 15 apartment tours lined up over the next few days so that we could try to get a lease signed before I left for a week in Mexico and Sam left to visit his family for Thanksgiving. It was a real whirlwind!
Now, a year out, I am so glad to have made the leap. There were a lot of things to love about Utah. I miss a lot of our friends there, as well as the incredible feeling of living in a house that we owned – it was a bit of an adjustment back to having a landlord, although it’s nice not to have to call our own plumber when things went wrong. And the hiking and natural beauty in Utah is unparalleled. But at the same time, I had been living there for about seven years, and I was looking for a change. And I’ve loved living in DC so far!
The best change has absolutely been how walkable the city is. We sold our car in Salt Lake before we moved, and I’ve been loving the ability to go pretty much anywhere on Metro or via bus. Also, I love walking through the city. I love trying to identify the flags at the embassies and coming across new monuments. Salt Lake’s urban design is a lot more car-centric.
Related to that, we are so connected to everything. This is the first time I’ve lived east of Chicago in the United States, and it blows my mind how interconnected and close everything is on the East Coast. We’re only a few hours from Philadelphia or New York, and there are Amtrak connections all up and down the Eastern seaboard. We have three airports, two of which are international, so the amount of direct flights that are available is incredible (even if more of them are on American Airlines).
It’s still strange that the national news is essentially our local news now – a visiting dignitary or a NATO conference can disrupt traffic or close metro stations. I somehow expected the politics to impact me more. I haven’t made any friends who work in politics, which is fine by me, but it means that I have felt strangely disconnected from all of it so far. It’s always a belated realization that the street I need to go down is currently hosting the IMF or something. We’ll see if that changes.
What I love about it being the seat of government, of course, is our proximity to the embassies. I have gone on a lot of trips lately that have required visas. When I went to Djibouti in January, the evisa wasn’t working for me and it was a game changer to be able to show up live and get help applying for a tourist visa in person. I’ve had something of a marathon of visa applications for the trip I’m currently on. It gave me options – for one of them, going to the consulate was just up the road and meant I could get the visa in advance instead of doing it on arrival, so I could carry less cash and have one less that I had to worry about at a border.
The Smithsonian museums are incredible as well. They are world class cultural institutions, and they’re free. It means there are more options of what to go do on the weekends and what to show visitors. I’ve made it a goal to go to all of the Smithsonian museums here, which is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, because it is possible to get museum’d out.
This is the first time I’ve moved to a city where I’ve actually known people. The other times I’ve moved as an adult – to Chicago for school, to SLC for my first job, and to a lesser degree, to Copenhagen and Strasbourg for temporary educational opportunities – I’ve known no one. Moving with Sam obviously made a huge difference, and it was nice to actually have a bit of a network out here already.
The types of people who are interested in moving to DC are more of my type of people as well. While I made amazing friends in Utah, the type of person who would move to Utah as an adult was often so outdoorsy that we had little in common as far as hobbies go. Sam and I once went to a party where every single other person we met did backcountry skiing. The DC vibe is more internationally minded, and more interested in indie movies or trying a new restaurant than hiking a 14er.
DC isn’t perfect. No place is, because life is messy and unpredictable and there will always be stressors. But I’ve had a pretty great first year here. It’s impossible to know what the future holds, but at least for now, my future is here in DC!