I woke up this morning to the dreadful news of the plane crash in Washington DC. It's such a terrible thing to happen, the people on the plane were so near to landing, and now no one is going home. The only comfort, if you can call that, is everything happened in a snap second, hopefully no one will have felt anything. RIP.
The news reminded me of my previous visit to DC, a trip from quite a distant memory, something that I had nearly forgotten as I only have a handful of photos to remind me.
In my previous life, I worked for a joint venture between a UK and American telecoms company. The JV was supposed to conquer the global communications industry... so they said. We lasted for 2 years 🙂 I was the only person from the UK company to join the finance team in Hong Kong, the rest were from the American company. It was quite a culture change for me, working from a British environment to an American one, plus I felt I was an outsider dropped into a team that already knew each other. Luckily my new manager was very nice and treated me the same as the rest of her existing team.
During my time there, my manager engineered a trip to the US for me and one of my colleagues, this is how I ended up in Washington DC. The JV's main operation in America was in San Jose California on the west coast, and the finance operations at Reston in Virginia on the east coast. The main purpose of our trip was to meet with finance team in Reston. I think there was talk of us going to San Jose as well to meet with the operations team, but I honestly can't remember if that happened. I found this photo of me at the airport. The plane is too small to fly across the Pacific between Hong Kong and America, so I'm thinking maybe we did go to San Jose?
We had a free weekend at Reston and since it was so near to Washington DC, my colleague and I decided to go there. Neither of us had been before. We went to the main tourist spots, including the White House of course. This was a business trip and we hadn't planned anything in advance, let alone a tour of the White House. This was the nearest I could get to it.
The Washington Monument was outside the White House. I think at that time I didn't have much appreciation of the monument or even know what it was 😅. If it's outside the White House and lots of people are taking photos of it, then it must be important.
The Lincoln Memorial was something that I did know about. Who hasn't heard about Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech even if you haven't listened to the actual speech? We strolled over from the Washington Monument, it looked like a very nice day for a walk in this capital city.
This is the last photo I have of my Washington DC trip, standing on the steps of Lincoln Memorial looking towards Washington Memorial. If it wasn't for these photos and the sad news today, I would have forgotten about this trip. It's a little blurry and I wish I had better memories of it. Next time.
