Guus Bosman

On the road from Court House to Rosslyn, Clarendon Boulevard, there is an old bar. The place is run down and seems to be no longer in use.

The commercials and outside decorations are still there, and an eye catcher is a car that's standing with its front in the air.
The car a curious sight, and it's a strange idea to see a closed nightclub: people had a lot of fun there, and now everything's gone.

However, when I looked on internet for "Dr. Dremo's", the name of the place, I found out that the bar is not closed at all. Only the patio is undergoing "winterizing". The day after I read this, I went to look at the bar and indeed, what I had seen so far was only the backside: in front there was another part that was fully lighted and in full use.

It said in the Washington Post that they have an extensive beer collection with a lot of beers on tap. So, it might actually be a nice place to visit once, but probably only in the summer, when it won't look so terribly desolated anymore.

Since a few days Starbucks has a new coffee on display: Aged Sumatra. Every now and then they have packages of special coffee beans for sale, and I was really curious about this one.

The beans of this coffee have been aged five years, which gives a taste. It is supposed to have been discovered when the Dutch V.O.C. ships transported coffee beans from Indonesia to Europe, which took many months.

I asked if there was a way to try the coffee, without having to buy a package, and when I came in in the afternoon when it wasn't very busy they custom made me a cup of coffee from these beans. They used a French press for it (which I believe is known in Holland as a Turkish' coffee machine).

I liked to coffee a lot, it has a very special taste: a more mellow and smoother flavor than regular Sumatra, and far less acidity. It was nice, but I don't think I'll get a package of this for at home. I prefer the regular blend in the mornings.

This weekend is a working weekend for me and my team. Today I was in the office. Originally we all planned to come in, but due to the weather my colleagues stayed at home and worked from there.

It's been snowing all day, and that's big news in all the media. There's an official "winter storm", and a "sever weather warning" is active. When they announced that on the news last week I thought it would really storm, and snowing 50cm per day, but it turns out to be a moderate snow, nothing as dramatic as been shown in the news. We just saw more than 5 different news channels, and they all had specials on the "severe" weather.

But even though it's not as bad as all the warnings would have you believe, the snow has a big impact on people's lives here. Traffic is going very slow because the snow is falling so quickly that it's hard to keep the roads clean. Many shops and buildings are closed too, even the Kinko's near our apartment building that's usually open 24 hours is closed untill tomorrow morning.

Yesterday evening Sasha and I went out for dinner together, which was great. Later we briefly went to a birthday party in a bar at Adam's Morgan. On the way back the driver of our cab was a lady from Romania, who had rather interesting views of the world.

What do Dutch people bring when travelling from and to the US?

Read about in in a nice discussion on AllesAmerika.com.

On the list to the U.S. are pindakaas (peanut butter) and borrelnootjes (coated nuts). Favorites to bring to Holland from the U.S. are clothes and BBQ sauce. No one mentioned volkorenbrood yet.