Although I haven't seen Shawn in over four years, it was exactly as if we'd last seen each other a week ago. We resumed right where we'd left off, in our same easy-going way. We've both been through significant changes since we were were together as boyfriends a decade ago. Shawn is no longer as wide-eyed and untravelled; he lived for two years in Turkey. And I'm not quite as innocent as I used to be. But none of that has changed the essence of our relationship.

When I arrived at his place on Wednesday night, I was fairly amazed at how nice his apartment was. I didn't recall that he had such taste and style; his apartment is filled with carefully chosen antiques and knick-knacks. I found myself trying to fit an otherwise unchanged Shawn into these new sohisticated surroundings.

On Thursday morning, I woke up after a good night's sleep on his sofa bed and decided, despite my jetlag, that I needed to get out for a run. I was feeling out-of-shape after a week of strep throat inactivity, and a day of stuffing myself with airline fast-food. Shawn lives in a quaint neighborhood of small bunglalows in large plots of land. Most of the neighborhood seems to be populated with elderly white-haired people, and it was nice, as I ran through the quiet streets, crunching the first red leaves of Fall under my feet, that people would say hello as I passed. That certainly doesn't happen in San Francisco.

One thing you notice here, and all over the D.C. metropolitan area, is that American flags are everywhere. Not only in people's yards, but hanging off buildings, and from bridges over the freeways. There are home-made banners with patriotic slogans too; slogans such as "Fight for your liberty" that would have seemed completely surprising and out-of-place a few weeks ago.

After breakfast and all, we got a late start on our way to Harpers Ferry. I'd heard of this place only because one of my email correspondents lives there. But I actually didn't know, or had forgotten, that it's a National Historic Park. It's set in a valley at the point where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers meet, and feels as if it's been frozen in time. The whole little town has been taken over by the National Park Service, I guess, and although almost all the buildings do actually look as if they're survivors from the Civil War era, it also has a kind of Disneyfied feeling to it. The relative lack of tourists due to the current crisis added to the air of unreality.

Grey Fall day in Harpers Ferry

Shawn squats in the ruins of an ancient church. Well, ancient by American standards :) Mid 1800s.

Leaning against Jefferson Rock, which overlooks the Shenandoah

Shawn is better at posing than I am!

By four in the afternoon, my jetlag was catching up with me, so we went home and I took a nap. We spent a quiet evening; Shawn cooked salmon and rice (I don't remember him being such a capable cook), and we drove to a nearby mall to go to the movies, where we saw a quite dreadful movie: "American Pie 2".

Next morning, it was time to pack up already, since Shawn had to go back to work, and I had to head to my hotel in D.C. - Shawn will drive in this evening to spend the weekend in D.C. with me. It took a long while to get into the city, eventhough I'd missed rush-hour. I didn't get to my hotel until eleven. It was in a rather shady section of town not far from the convention center - the kind of neighborhood where there are liquor stores with barred windows, and stupified drunks on the street silently sipping from bottles shrouded in paper bags. It wasn't quite what I expected. I'd payed for the hotel in advance through a discount-hotel website, and thought it would be a business class hotel. If only I'd waited to book my room, I could have gotten a steal of a deal at any of D.C.s nice hotels now.

I had a kind of a date thing lined up for the afternoon, a guy I'd met through HotorNot. We met up at, of course, the Starbucks in Dupont Circle, and went for lunch at Afterwords Cafe, next door. He's a little younger than me. Okay, he's a lot younger than me - twenty-five, to be exact. But we hit it off, and spent the afternoon hanging out in Dupont Circle, and later visiting the Capitol grounds. I like the guy, but I'm not entirely sure if anything is going to happen. We agreed to call each other tonight. Shawn and I will be taking a late dinner before going out to the bars. We'll hopefully go to one of the delightfully sordid strip-bars that D.C. seems to specialize in. Tell ya all 'bout it tomorrow :)

The Capitol under a threatening grey sky

Finally, a bit of sunshine.