1. How best to describe my folly? Let's begin with D.C. streets. In both the NW and NE parts of the D.C. quadrant, many street names are the same. They are lettered streets and numbered streets. So, today, when I got off the Metro train at Union Station, I wanted to go to H Street NE and about 4th. I l left the station and started walking. I found H Street and made my way toward 4th. I got to 4th and there was no H Street Festival, my destination. I kept trudging forward and suddenly I was in Chinatown. Hmmm. I thought. Does D. C. have two Chinatowns? I kept going and arrived at the general area of the Verizon Center and realized I was on H Street NW, not H Street NE. It was over eighty degrees and I was getting heated up, but, I decided to reverse myself and so I trudged to H Street NE, arrived at 4th Street, and lo and behold, I found the H Street Festival.
2. After all this sidewalk walking in the afternoon heat, I was beat. The H Street Festival was packed with people walking up and down H Street and with food vendors selling bbq, rice and noodles, sandwiches, and a host of other offerings; all kinds of clothes and jewelry vendors were out; I think there were eight music stages; politicians had volunteers out distributing pamphlets. I was too tired to get my camera out and I took in what I could of the festival by walking around for about an hour and I headed back to Molly and Hiram's. H Street, in case you're wondering, was a busy commercial area in the middle of the 20th century, had begun to decline, and was devastated by the riots and the fires set in the days following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. It's been only in the last ten years or so that the area has recovered from the damage in 1968 and the festival is an annual celebration of a broken street and neighborhood recovering.
3. I experimented with bits and pieces of a couple of recipes and made a ginger garlic sesame tofu-cold Chinese noodle-cabbage-red pepper salad that both the Deke and Molly enjoyed.
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