When I moved to the Washington DC area, I marveled at all the events that were taking place on a daily basis. While DC is smaller than New York, if you take into account all the outlying areas, which had their own community events, you couldn’t do half of what was out there even if you didn’t work and dedicated all your free time to going to these things around the region every day.

Yet, whenever I had guests come to visit, I would often look in the Washington Post and not really find anything that interesting. Sure, there were museum exhibits and concerts, but after a while, trekking through the same museums gets a bit tiresome, and concerts can get expensive, and the smoke and noise eventually made them not the best venue, especially for older guests.

A couple of years ago we moved out to a suburb of DC called Vienna (Virginia). It’s a cute town that isn’t filled with the big box stores that you find in many other places. It does have some small strip malls, but about the only chains are a few grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, a Michaels, and that’s about it. Most of the stores are small one-shop deals. While it's not old compared to many New England towns, at over 150, it also isn't like some of the newer suburbs not far away that are filled with townhouses and McMansions.  Among the more unique businesses in Vienna is a place that’s a coffee shop, music store, and concert venue in one, called Jammin’ Java. There are a couple of high-end wine stores that have just opened up this year. There are some great bicycle stores (The W&OD bike path runs right through the center of Vienna), some wonderful bakeries, a surprisingly large collection of ethnic restaurants, and also more high-end gourmet places in addition to the fast food, diners, etc.  There are a number of gardens and parks in Vienna, some of which  host outdoor concerts or movies, and there two weekly farmers markets.  Vienna hosts street fairs, parades, a large variety of classes and events at its community center, town hall, library, and various businesses around the town.

The feel of Vienna to me, at least, is that of a “small” town, but it has a lot of resources, and things to do and see. The charms of this town weren’t lost on Money Magazine, which recently named Vienna it’s 4^th best place to live in the country.

Vienna’s website lists some of the more official events like parades, town meetings, etc., but I always thought there should be some organized list of events that was more comprehensive. Of course, we don’t just stay in Vienna all year, but travel around the region, and to other states, but the idea of having a list of things to do within walking distance or slightly more had some odd appeal to me. Maybe this had to do with growing up in Manhattan and being able to walk to many things. Or maybe it was just the fictionalized places on TV that charmed me – like Sicily, Alaska, or Everwood, Colorado.

Still, even for this small town, compiling such a list would have been a big pain. There have been online calendar systems out there for a while, but when Google launched theirs earlier this year, it impressed me as being easier and more powerful than previous ones. You can create your own calendars for private use, or use with a select group, or have one that’s completely public. You can have as many calendars as you want displayed, or you can “filter” out the ones you want to see at any given moment. 

A bunch of people or businesses have started public Google calendars meant to help promote a business or resource and aid clientele. So, I thought, why not create something for Vienna? I searched for something like this but couldn’t find anything. I searched for calendars by Vienna businesses or associations and the only thing I found was one for the large concert arena called Wolftrap, whose address is technically Vienna, but which is still even further from the Vienna town center than the large business and commercial center called Tysons Corner whose postal address is McLean, VA.

So, I decided to start my own Vienna Google Calendar. Luckily some businesses like Jammin’ Java and the local Wholefoods at least have an online calendar, and of course there is the Vienna Virginia website’s calendar. To these I added some other events that I found from the local Michael’s, the Vienna-Tysons Regional Chamber of Commerce, Fairfax County Parks & Recreation, etc. I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but even so, it seems there’s stuff going on just about every day of the week, and usually multiple overlapping things, forcing you to pick and choose. Now I’ll admit that some of these things may not be of interest to many people, but still, it’s nice to know that there are lots of things going on just a few minutes away.

I’m trying to update the calendar as often as time allows, but for one already busy person, it can be a challenge. That’s why I’d like to make a request for some help. If you are a Vienna resident and come across this blog entry and would like to help out with the calendar, I would be grateful!

You can view an html version of the Google Calendar by clicking on the following link:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0819geutosia1q06k831pnokv8%40group.calendar.google.com  

But I recommend a more powerful way to view the calendar – create your own Google Calendar account. You can create your own calendar(s) for personal/family/friends, etc. And then you can search for public calendars of some interest and add those as ones you “subscribe to.” In addition to my Google Calendar, I also subscribe to Wolftrap’s, to one for Washington Cultural Events, and one for another eclectic coffee shop in Falls Church, VA. To find the Vienna Google Calendar, just go to Settings/Calendars/, hit the Add Calendars button at the bottom of the page, and then enter “Vienna, VA” in the Search Criteria, and it should be the first one that comes up.

In any case, it is kind of ironic that I’m doing this now, since I have an 11-month-old child that demands most of my free time and the only place she likes to be taken to is the neighborhood park!

Oh, I forgot you can actually embed Google calendar's in web pages, so here's an embeded version of the calendar:

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Related Entries:

• Vienna 4th best place to live in the U.S.!
• Vienna Virginia Yahoo! Group

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Although I grew up in New York, only two and a half hours from Atlantic City, I didn’t get there till college.  My parents were just not the gambling type.  My mom to this day still hasn’t been there or to any casino.  The first few times I went, I just played the slots.  This was during college so the amount of money that I could lose without going into debilitating debt was in the double digits.  I don’t think I ever came away with more money than I left. 

Then about four years ago, our friend Jim had his bachelor party in AC.  It had been at least 10 years since the last time I had been there and I was a bit more financially stable.  On the way there one of our friends schooled me a bit in black jack basic strategy.  I had played blackjack from childhood, but never knew there was an actual strategy based on probability.  I’m not even sure that when I had played in the past that it was against a dealer who had to hit until they got to 17.  So I was familiar with the very basics, but not any of the intricacies.  We played quite a bit over the two days we were there and somehow I walked away with over $300.  I was astounded.  This was not chump change.  It did seem to accumulate fairly steadily playing $10 bets.  If it were this easy, I thought, I could, nay, SHOULD, come to AC on a regular basis to supplement my income!  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

A couple months later, I could no longer wait.  I got my two roommates at the time, Barry and Rich, and headed for AC again.  We played black jack the whole time again, but somehow things didn’t work out the way they had before.  I was down immediately and kept trying to dig myself out of this hole.  By the end of the weekend, we had all lost around $700 each!  It was not fun.  We chocked it up to not leaving a table that was just continually taking our money.  The dealer we had for a long time had a name tag that read “Khan” and we just kept yelling the name in an angry-James T. Kirk impersonation from Stark Trek III as our money slipped away. 

This experience, of course, sobered us up to the fact that you can’t COUNT on winning anything when you gamble.  This should be obvious but of course psychology can get in the way of the obvious.  I for one decided that this was enough money to lose for quite a while and so didn’t want to have anything to do with gambling for a while.  A year or so ago, Rich had a bachelor party in Vegas and I really did want to go, not just for the gambling, of course, but because it was his bachelor party and because I’d never been to Vegas.  Alas, I could afford to at the time.  I did not start thinking of AC at that point and really had no big wish to go there until Blair suggested it a few weeks ago.

So I headed there with Rich and his wife Jen and met Blair and a few friends and Rich’s parents.  We spent a good amount of time at Bally’s Wild West playing black jack.  Unfortunately the minimum bet was $15, making it a bit more volatile, but fortunately I got on a winning streak immediately and the slightly higher betting amount made it easy for me to accumulate a good chunk of money.  Next we headed up to Resorts Casino, but we were there for only an hour at the most before having to go, and luckily at that point I was up as well.  We spent a little time on the boardwalk and then grabbed some dinner before heading home.

It was a very successful trip, and I’m sure why.  First of all, I won significantly more than I lost.  Of course a big part of this is luck and so something that you can’t actually make happen.  But also I went with firm limits about how much I was willing to lose and how much I would walk away with.  I never got to that upper limit because another “limit” got in the way – our time limit.  When you only have a finite amount of time, one that is relatively short, plus you mix meals in and a walk, etc., you don’t end up having an opportunity to lose large sums of money if you play the minimum bets and you choose a game that gives close to 50/50 odds.  Of course this isn’t a certainty, but it’s at least a lot more likely with those things taken into account.  I also have a different feeling coming home this time.  Instead of the previous thoughts of being able to rely on this luck over and over again in order to get extra money, I feel like I was lucky enough this time and should enjoy my winnings for a good while before I go back and risk losing that same money again!

I figure a trip to AC once or twice a year is plenty for me at this point, but now that I have signed up for some of their club cards, they will be sending me offers, some of which, I’m sure, will be pretty tempting.  I think the fact my wife isn’t a gambler and doesn’t like the whole idea of it is going to keep me away as much as anything else.  We will have to see how this works out, but at least I don’t have illusions of ever relying on gambling as a form of income any more!

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When I came back from the USSR, I was faced with having to find a job since I was at that point done with college.  As luck would have it, the organization that I went through for my study abroad, CIEE, was losing a program assistant for their Eastern European and Russian Summer programs and I was in the right place at the right time.  I started working there in January of 1990 and by the spring on 1991 I was able to convince them to at least in part sponsor a trip to some of the program sites.  Basically, I wanted to visit my sister who was at that time studying abroad for a semester in Scotland, and somehow I came up with the brilliant proposal to CIEE that if they paid for my airfare over to Eastern Europe and I paid the rest, I could take over a video camera, shoot some footage of the programs for promotional purposes, and I would also get a more intimate understanding of the programs by being at the sites.  Amazingly enough, they went for the idea and were generous enough to pay for all my airfare.  The video I took was probably not the best quality and I tried to get a friend to edit it, but it never happened.  They never asked for the video, so probably it they were not expecting anything much anyway.

So, my first stop was Hungary – Budapest to be specific.  I remember getting to visit the university the students held classes in and riding on some trams, but I was only there a few days, and apparently I did not get to do much that was memorable.  I remember seeing some McDonalds and maybe Burger Kings on the way to the train station and was taken aback by how westernized the country seemed just a couple years after the iron curtain had come down.  I can’t imagine what it looks like now!  I wish I had had a longer stay so that I could have gotten a better look at the place and a better feel for the culture, etc.  The resident director for CIEE’s program escorted me and perhaps this was part of the problem.  Either she just was not a very good escort or it would have been more helpful if I had tried to explore more on my own.

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The one Baltic country that I did not get to go to on during my stay in the USSR was the one I wanted to visit the most – Lithuania.  I wanted to go there because supposedly that is where some of my ancestry is from on one side.  Actually, it seems like I have ancestry from all over that area – Byelorussia, Lithuania, Austria-Hungry, and Poland.  My mother’s mother’s family even traced one of their relatives to Italy, so maybe I am 1/32nd Italian and that’s where my fascination with Tuscany, Vino Nobile de Montelpulciano, the Italian Language, and espresso all come from!

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Our next trip was with the entire (thirty-plus person) group of students and resident directors.  We stayed at a nice hotel and toured some monuments, and then somehow ended up on the shore of the Gulf of Riga.  Although it was December, the beach was still a tourist destination and there were a fare number of people walking in heavy coats along the beach and even an old woman going for a swim. 

Being a tourist destination, there was a guy set up to take pictures of people at the beach for a small fee.  He was apparently helping someone when an Asian tourist (Russian) came up to me and started asking how much it was to take a picture of her.  I was a bit confused and then figured out that she thought that I was the camera guy, since I had my Nikon FE2 hanging around my neck!  At this point the real photo guy realized what was happening and came over to clear things up.  It was all very funny and we all had a good laugh about it and I ended up taking their picture together that I still have.  Still on the beach, a few of us ducked into this little café that was on the beach for a bite to eat. 

The whole memory of the place is a bit surreal.  We were only there for a couple of days, so the little pieces I do remember seem odd and I might not even remember a lot of this but for the photos I still have.  I will endeavor to post some eventually, but none are scanned and digital photography had not really come about (at least commercially) when I was over there.  So now I am faced with the mammoth task of scanning in negatives and prints from the 30+ years of my life before digital!  If anyone knows of a cheap service where bulk scanning of prints and negatives can be made, I’d love to hear about them!

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I don’t remember a whole lot about Kiev.  We were only there for a day, I think, and a bit too much Armenian wine (20% alcohol and 20% sugar) killed a sufficient amount of brain cells to make the visit somewhat hazy.  What I do remember is separating from the group with a fellow participant in my program, Matt, and exploring a bit of Kiev.  We started to see crowds of people and banners but not knowing Ukrainian, we could only make out so much. 

Ukrainian is not that far from Russian, but for a non-native speaker it probably takes a good while to start to divine some of the Ukrainian words.  It’s just different enough in other words, so that a non-native speaker of Russian would still have a very hard time understanding.  Kind of the same as if someone learning English but without a mastery of it was all of a sudden faced with a really extreme Cockney Accent, or one from the hood, or something similarly distant from standard English.  Maybe even a little worse then that since Ukrainian is actually considered its own language whereas Cockney et al are simply “dialects.”

Anyway, we tried asking some of the locals what was going on, but again, the language barrier made it difficult.  We got to the hub of the excitement that was in front of some official building.  We waited around for a bit and then what everyone was waiting for happened – Boris Yeltsin arrived in a limo, got out and started shaking hands in the crowd before going into the building.  People were clapping and cheering (this was of course way before he became president and so his reputation was generally as a progressive and not as a drunk).  My friend Matt was actually able to get through the crowd and actually shake Yeltsin’s hand.  I was a bit more timid.  I may have tried to get some pictures, but I can’t remember if I had my camera there.  If I did try to get some of Yeltsin, I wasn’t able to due to the swarming crowd…  I at least caught a glimpse of him – my only brush with fame while in the Former Soviet Union…

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I began studying the Russian in my sophomore year in college.  At the time my major was journalism and they required 2 years of a foreign language.  I'd taken Spanish in high school but was never very good at it, and not very interested in learning it.  But somehow Russian was different.  It was more of a challenge, more "exotic" and besides I was really interested in the initial churnings of democracy that country was going through - this was back in 1988 and I was listening to Radio Moscow on short wave if not every night then at least a few times a week.

Anyway, I really took to Russian and eventually switched my major to it, but I did this somewhat late and would not be able to graduate the year I should have - 1990.  So I determined that I would get my last credits while on a study abroad program at Leningrad State University.  Luckily my professors let me go through the graduation ceremonies even though I hadn't fulfilled all my credits.

So at the beginning of September, 1990, I headed off to the Soviet Union (as it would still be called for a couple of years) along with about 30 other 20-22-year-olds (and maybe a few who were a little older).  The program we were on was sponsored by the Council on International Educational Exchange, or CIEE (It was SMOO in Russian, so that's what we called it).  Most of us spent 4 months there, but some of my classmates became so entranced with the place (or at least with the men/women they met there) that they ended up going back and staying for much longer periods of time.  I longed to return for a long time even though my time there was not always "fun."

It was definitely a growing experience in  a lot of ways for me.  I mean of course culturally I got a flavor for a very different (and yet in some ways very similar) environment to where I grew up.  I somehow got it that despite language and cultural differences, people were basically the same at heart.  But at the same time those language and cultural differences can be a big barrier for some in actually communicating with others. 

Other then this, I had started to come out of my own shell a bit.  I was painfully shy during much of high school and college and really stuck to a very small circle, didn't really venture out all that much, although I think given the chance I would have.  But being in a foreign country without any good friends kind of forces one to either withdraw completely (which I probably did for the first few weeks), or actually put ones self out there and start actively trying to make friends.

Although some of the places we went to within the USSR were then considered part of it - "Republics" - I thought it would be better to address them seperately since they are now countries in and of themselves.  So I will try to mention a little only about the places that are still within the borders of Russia.  As I mentioned, we studied at Leningrad State University, which is in Leningrad, of course, but Leningrad is now referred to by its older name St. Petersburg.  Our dorms were on Vasilevsky Island, right next to the beach that looked out onto the Gulf of Finland.  We were only a few blocks away from a big hotel called the Pribaltiskaya where I would go every night to get dinner from one of the many "bufets" on almost every floor of the place.  They would take rubles and even at the government rate at the time (which was much worse than the black market rate), you could get a good meal for next to nothing.  It was much better in any case than going to the cafeteria at our dorm where you had no idea what exactly it was you were eating!  The holy grail at the Pribaltiskaya was getting into one of the restaurants and getting actual restaurant meal items like roast chicken, blini, etc.  But this was next to impossible it seemed.  They only wanted to serve guests at the hotel, and we were only able to trick or cajole them a few times during our stay.  Of course people who weren't guests were not supposed to be in the hotel at all, and often some of my friends would get asked to leave as soon as they came in.  For some reason I was usually allowed to come in without any hassles but I think I did a good job of looking like a dumb tourist so they just assumed I was a guest.

Aside from Leningrad, we went a few other places in Russia proper.  We went to some outlying areas of Leningrad which I can't remember exactly now, but they were sites of royal homes of various tzars.  We also took a trip to Pushkin and Pskov to visit some very old churches.  Actually, this turned out to be so much of a theme of our trips outside of Leningrad that we all proclaimed we never wanted to see a church again!  Finally, we went to Moscow.  Once we went with our entire group and another time I went on a type of weekend excursion that a few of us had designed and repeated a number of times to different locations.  Basically we would get on a really late train and get a sleeper car and sleep on our way to Moscow (or wherever). We'd spend the next day at our destination and then do the same thing going back.  Thus we never needed to arrange sleeping accommodations.  Hey, we were in college!  I don't think I could do that sort of thing now!  I remember once we even decided to play hookie and took off on Tuesday night and returned the following night!

They had just started opening some western places when we were over there and we of course had to take advantage of the McDonalds where everything was sold in Rubles.  If we were able to exchange dollars for rubles on the black market, we could basically get everything on the menu combined for a couple of dollars!  Generally food was cheap there at the time, although it was hard to find quality unless one went to one of the farmers markets where people were selling produce that you might want to eat.  If you went into a "grocery store" one tended to just lose one's appetite, either that or you just didn't see much of anything on the shelves.  We did go once a week to the top of the Pribaltiskaya where they had a foreign currency bar and we'd buy draft beers for $5 and feel like we were throwing our money away since that could have been a week's worth of dinners bought with rubles!  But I think the most expensive "meal" I had while I was there was in Moscow at a place where they served about 15 different dishes at least, banquet style.  This extravagent meal came to all of $2.50.  I know this is no longer the case in Russia or Eastern Europe.  Westernization has brought a much greater leveling of the currencies.  Still it was nice to feel "rich" for once in my life...

The only regret I have about the program is this.  One of the stated goals of the program is to immerse you in a foreign culture.  With this aim, there was a rule that you weren’t supposed to speak English to your classmates with the possible exception of in your dorm room.  I tried to obey this rule and even as others spoke to me in English I would still speak Russian, but after a while this became absurd.  It was either speak English or cut myself off even more from the people I had much of any chance of becoming friends with in this foreign place.  Because of this, my Russian proficiency during this period may have improved slightly, but not nearly as much as I had hoped.  I met people I still call my friends on this program and yet sometimes I wonder how much deeper of an experience I would have had if I had done a home-stay and really was not able to speak English with anyone.

Addendum:  Siberia!  Sorry, somehow I completely forgot about this one!  In the middle of our stay I, along with my two American roommates (Jason Pontius and Bill Reichert) and one Russian roommate (Igor Savelev) travelled to Syktyvkar which was in the Komi Autonomous Republic of Siberia.  I'm not sure if Komi still exists in any kind of administrative way anymore.  It was a cute town, but the only thing I remember doing is getting shuttled back and forth between Igor's Parents' Apartment (that's where he is from) and his Wife Sveta's Parents' Apartment.  We just kept getting fed all this great food wherever we went, but after a while it almost got to be too much!  Thankfully we did actually make it out cross-country skiing at one point which was great exercise and fun, and probably burned of half of what we ate.  It was  a very memorable part of my trip even though it was just a weekend.  Thank you Igor and Sveta  wherever you are (unfortunately I've lost touch with them)...

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I forgot about this trip to The Bahamas, which was really my first to another country, possibly because I always thought of these islands as a colony or protectorate or something.  As it turns out they were actually given their independence from the UK back in 1973, only about 6 years before I visited Nassau.

When I was 10 or 11, my mom was working as a copywriter for an advertising agency - I think it was Leber Katz.  They had just gotten a new account with Holland American Cruise Lines and everyone in the agency had a chance to get a highly discounted fare on one of their cruises.  My mom jumped at the chance.  It was my first time on a cruise and so far the only one.

We went in April and it was pretty cold and overcast almost the whole way down from New York City to the Bahamas.  The second or third day we were there I came down with a bad cold and had to miss out on the big luwow on the beach.  I subsequently spent most of the rest of the cruise in our cabin, and also missed out on the big finale dinner on the ship, although I remember my mom bringing back some baked Alaska and lobster.

Of Nassau I don’t remember much.  I think we took a small excursion one day in a glass-bottom boat to a smaller island off of Nassau called “Fantasy Island” although we didn’t meet Tattoo or Mr. Roark.  We did have a meal at a place along the beach and hung out on one of the beaches.  I also remember lots of people selling trinkets and that we bought a few of these, including some necklaces and straw hats.

I don’t think Nassau had a big impression on me at the time.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t really remember being all that impressed.  After all, we did not really go into the town, try to meet or talk to natives, etc.  We just hung out at the tourist spots, and to boot I was only there on that one day I think.

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The only real time we spent in Canada was in Windsor the night we arrived and the only place we went to in Windsor was a strip club.  Despite growing up in New York City and passing the seedy (at that time) Times Square area every day on the bus to and from school, I had never actually been to a strip club per se.  It was quite an odd experience and in the perhaps three times I've been to one since (mainly bachelor parties), they still seem very odd places.  The last time I went it was more interesting just listening to some of the off-duty strippers talk to a manager who was eating dinner at a table next to ours then it was watching the mechanical movements and plastic perfection and vacant 100-yard stares of the women on stage.

But I digress.  I am sure Canada has much to offer and when I was in Seattle last year with my fiancee we almost got to Victoria, but then found out that one must actually make reservations quite a ways in advance.  Next time we will definitely be more careful about that!  Considering my love of traveling to foreing places, I wonder why I haven't gone to Canada more than this once, since Toronto is only a little over an 8 hour drive and I suppose even less by train, and Montreal just a bit further...

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