Washington, DC

After living in California for 6 years, I wanted to try out living in the East Coast. New York is such a wonderful city but it’s too busy for me, and I couldn’t imagine myself hurrying to catch the metro everyday to get to work. Yet I never would have thought that I’ll be moving to the nation’s capital, and in 2011 I found myself living on the 7th Floor Condo Building in the Dupont Circle, one of DC’s trendiest neighborhoods.

Dupont Circle is more known as the Castro or the Hillcrest of Washington, DC. Although there are a lot of gay bars and is the location of the annual Halloween High Heel Drag Queen race, this neighborhood is more than the gay capital of the nation’s capital. In the very middle of the traffic circle sits a marble fountain designed by the same people who did the Lincoln Memorial. Around it is a park, where people gather to eat, read, nap, rest or just walk around. The neighborhood is also home to museums, historic homes and embassies, 4 of which were across the street from where I lived.

After work, I remember hurrying up to change, do some stretching then run around my neighborhood. From Massachusetts Ave I will make my way down 17th Street, past the White House until I reach the Washington Monument, circling it before going back. Aside from having a Metro here, there are some buses that go straight to NYC that stop here. Did I say convenient?

I stayed for 7 months, before moving back to California. Having had an emergency surgery then having no family in the east coast made me realize that I couldn’t live too far away from home for too long. I am thankful to have very good friends who took care of me but family is family.

I haven’t been back since I left, and seeing DC more and more on TV and after going over one of Dan Brown’s novels, I’ve been missing DC terribly. I am happy to have spent even just a few months and experience the east coast life I’ve been wanting to do and maybe one of these days, I’ll find myself sitting across that beautiful marble fountain once again.