Week Two Reflections

Looking back on our second week of class, I have to say it has been quite interesting. The sovereignty simulation we did was quite fun, albeit anarchic. Being our first simulation, I feel that we all took it with a bit of humor, invading and annexing neighboring nation-states, forming alliances, stealing resources, and so on. I believe that future simulations will be more serious, and, hopefully having satisfied our urge for conquest, that we will be able to work together to benefit the common good. In fact, our floor has proven itself an ample staging ground for various happenings, and I would find it most interested to see how the theories of international relations could be applied to our floor escapades.

One thing I thought was particularly relevant to our globally-oriented class was a trip I took with Stephan, Ashley, James, Caitlin, Emily, Liz, and Rebecca to Adams Morgan yesterday for dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. We had looked up a restaurant in advance, and set off to get a simple dinner and then return. When we got to Adams Morgan, however, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the 2007 Adams Morgan Street Festival was taking place! The street had been closed and a great number of different vendors had set up, selling everything from African arts to ethnic gourmets to hand-made woodcrafts. Accompanying the vendors were a great number of musical and dance performances of varying genre and nationality. We got quite distracted from our original plan and ended up exploring the entirety of the street and all it had to offer! We did eventually end up finding an Ethiopian restaurant called Meskerem, whose food was extremely tasty (and trust me, when a picky eater who’s never had Ethiopian food before says it is, it is!). Reflecting on the day, I feel that we were very lucky to have gone to Adams Morgan the day we did. Coming from a small town in Massachusetts with a largely homogeneous population, it was refreshing to see the true patchwork that is humanity: black, South American, European, tan, Ethiopian, Asian, Latino, African, white, Ghanaian, Mexican, Arab.

It’s wonderful – we are all so diverse and different, yet we are all so alike.

-Gregory Proulx

“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” – President John F. Kennedy