Meet Hannah

Remember way back to last year when I applied for a Fulbright Teacher Exchange, won the grant, and then the US Government took it away immediately afterwards because of the sequester?

Shortly after that, the Fulbright people contacted me to say that the UK Embassy was so annoyed by our government's financial incompetence (not their words), they are going to pay for the UK teachers to come visit their would-be US counterparts.

The UK teachers spent last week in Washington, D.C. learning about the U.S. educational system on the federal level and in Sacramento learning about it at the state level.  This morning I drove out to DIA to pick up my would-be counterpart, Hannah.  She'll be my houseguest and work companion for the next almost-week!

She's here to see the sites of Colorado as much as she is to learn about school systems on a local level, so we headed straight for Boulder.

I had planned on doing Boulder tomorrow, but I switched plans when I saw tomorrow's forecast (7-10 inches of snow!  What the what?!)

We were both starving, so we headed to that good Italian place on Pearl Street for lunch first, then strolled about enjoying the gorgeous weather and the always-entertaining people of Boulder.  The Farmer's Market was still going strong, although neither of us joined in on the Silent Disco Hula Hoop Party.

We did go into the Dushanbe Tea House and got a table right next to the koi pond to enjoy, as Hannah called it without irony, "a spot of tea."

Statuary in the koi pond

I tried the Boulder Tangerine tea - "a spicy blend of cinnamon and tangerine."

We headed towards my place after a bit more walking about and a quick stop at Boulder's Trader Joe's to get Hannah some groceries (and so I can officially check all three Trader Joe's in Colorado off my list!).  Home for a quick nap for Hannah, then out we went again, this time to the Alamo to see "Captain America.

It turned out to be appropriate for a foreigner's visit in more ways than I expected, since the movie takes place in DC and has quite a lot of scenic shots and sequences.  Hannah was tickled by how much she recognized after her brief time there earlier this week, and I got to enjoy my own smugness over how well I seem to know DC after my summers there.  "There's no buildings tall enough in that area to create that window's view," and such.

We were both pretty exhausted after the movie - me, from a late night at Rachel's and an even later night cleaning my apartment afterwards, Hannah from catching an early-morning flight after a travel-intensive week - so we're taking an early bedtime.  Tomorrow we have tickets to Monkey Town 4, but I'm a bit concerned about the 8-12 inches of snow predicted for the exact same time.  Hannah wants a true Colorado experience, though, and there's nothing like wondering whether a show will happen with a large snowstorm blowing in.