Just live your life, no tellin' where it will take ya ♥

I'm here! :)
I can't believe it.
I've never been this far away from home, or have lived away from home for a long period of time.. its crazy!
It seems like just yesterday i was sitting on my couch in Amherst talking to Miss Katherine "Funk" Lundy about whether or not to apply.
On the eve of my first day of my internship I'm excited and nervous. I can already feel that I'm going to get much more out of this experience then just an internship and a class (although they should be an AMAZING experience). I feel that the people i meet are going to teach me a alot.
I am really happy and blessed with my roommates. We all get along and come from different experiences.

Since I've gotten here we have already learned a lot about D.C. and true apartment living.

My Dad and me drove down from Massachusetts on Tuesday because of the snow storm. When we reached Maryland it started to snow/slush and it was funny because the whole highway slowed down...they aren't really snow experts like us i guess. After arriving in Alexandria VA (where I'm living) we got a hotel room and went down to Old Alexandria to walk around. We went to the Hard Times Cafe which has amazing chilli, which is kind of there staple. If you ever come down to Virginia or Maryland i recommend stopping in. I don't even really like chilli and i thought it was good, so that must stand for something.
Wednesday i checked into my apartment! Which is niiiice. We have a large living room, two large bedrooms, two bathrooms and a small kitchen (hey, you can't get it all). We also have a washing machine and a dish washer....pretty snazzy. After that Pops and i went to D.C. and found a nice Irish restaurant (we're from Massachusetts..what do you expect?).

Our apartment is jinxed. We kid around that the apartment doesn't want us to live here because it keeps doing things to make us leave. On move in day, our power went out. We thought that that was weird, but we went to the breaker and fixed the problem. The next morning we woke up and we had no power again, and we couldn't fix it. Eventually we found out that one light was hurting the system. Since then, we have found that our heater wasn't heating our water correctly, our cable wasn't receiving all of the channels it was supposed to receive, we need a splitter for the TV to receive internet or we have to shut off one or the other, our shelf fell out of our freezer, and our washer wasn't hooked up. This last one was the worst. Our washer flooded our whole carpet in the walkway, it went down two floors before it got fixed. But ya know what.. its all been okay. We've just kind of laughed about it and fixed it. 904 doesn't love us, i guess that's the bottom line. Oh, and the maintenance people are so unbelieveably kind. I need to bake them cookies.

My apartment is in Alexandria VA, which is only a handful of metro stops away from D.C. When you look out of our window we can see the Washington monument and the Capitol building.
Lately has been a whirlwind of exploring and getting settled into living in the city. Yesterday one of my roommates Sabrina and I went sight seeing. I didn't really feel like I lived in D.C. until we walked around and saw the sights. It made me really excited to be here and I felt really cool when someone asked US for directions... and WE could give them!

Tomorrow i start my internship. Its pretty crazy getting there for me. I have to take the metro and then a bus. I'm interning in another town in Virginia, i'm not interning in the district. But it should be good. I'm still here in the D.C. area and it should be interesting to see our interaction with D.C. The internship was exactly what i was looking for so it doesn't matter that it isn't directly there. I'll be there enough for programming, class and exploring! I also start my class tomorrow night. I'm taking a class about leadership and running a nonprofit organization. I think it should be really helpful in learning more about nonprofits and something i wouldn't have been able to find at UMass.

Well, time to get some sleep for the big day tomorrow!
Peace & Love
♥ Steph Bose