Friday night we went to the grand opening of Love, a new night club in DC. The building was a nightclub before, Dreams, but we had never been there.

We had tickets for the grand opening Friday and we had a very enjoyable evening. Entering the club was an impressive experience with at least 20 security guys in black suits at the door.

The place is very stylish: carpet, wooden walls, beautiful furniture -- very classy, like a very good hotel, just with music. I especially liked the 3rd floor, with the lounge seats, almost in a beach club style.

Thursday evening Rosa came for dinner.

We made mie. It's the first time that I cooked that here, and it took me a while to find the ingredients in the supermarkt. It came out quite nice, with spicy chicken, and a side dish of snow beans with mushrooms and nuts.

Rosa had brought deserts: brownie cookies and a mousse cake, delicious. We saw pictures of Sasha's vacation, and spent a nice evening on the balcony.

After our visit to the Natural History Museum two weeks ago, we went Cosi's to have lunch. Around the Mall there are not a lot of places to go for lunch in the weekend. Most restaurants are only open during the week, it's a business district. We had salads, sandwiches and coffee, and we took a picture of us together using the self-timer option.

After we had lunch we visited the National Archive. I have been there two years ago, but then I only saw the main documents. Saturday I found out that there is also a large museum in the building with many historical materials such as TV bulletins, papers and sounds recordings. I enjoyed it a lot and we'll certainly visit it again.

In the evening I cooked for the five of us. I made Chinese, and it was really fun to cook for a large group of people.

Last week I saw this interesting sign near the Old Post Office.

It's probably just my mind playing tricks.

Jaap and Mieke left yesterday morning from Dulles airport.

Obviously, we arrived there very early and the check-in line was short. Everything went well except that the airline clerk almost forgot to take out my parent's I-94 papers. That would have been inconvenient. Jaap and Mieke were flying with KLM/North West, and when we arrived at Dulles we saw that some of the maintenance personel of Nortwest was on strike. There were other people working instead of the strikers, so the airline could keep on flying.

We had coffee together, and after an hour or so I took the bus back to Rosslyn. It was sad to say goodbye, we had had a couple of very nice weeks together.

Today, Sunday, was a very happy day: I went to Dulles airport again to pick up Sasha. She's been with her parents the last few weeks and her plane arrived around 2 o'clock from Milan, Italy. It's wonderful to be together again.

When we were in line for the check in counter yesterday I saw that I had a missed call from Ettie. We called her back (using a phone card). Jaap and Mieke arrived safely Sunday morning in the Netherlands, and went to bed extremely early: 19:30 o'clock local time.

Last Saturday we visited the National History Museum. Friday we for some drinks in an Irish bar so it took some time to get up. We took the metro the Mall, the five of us.

We visited the museum of Natural History. It was very busy and the rooms with the most popular attractions such as the Hope Diamond were really crowded. We spent about two hours in the museum. I really enjoyed the collection of skeletons of prehistorics animals, and the sea-life collection.

Mieke in the metro.

Jerry and Marjolein.

The elephant in the main rotundra of the museum.

The skeleton of an underwater swimmer.

Dinosaur skeleton.

Mieke and the Hope Diamond.

There is a lot of renovation going on in our apartment building, after the severe leak damage that occured when somebody broke a sprinkler outlet.

Today a large crane was installed next to the apartment building. Our building is over twenty floors, and it's a huge crane. To set up the main crane a secondary crane was necessary.

Jaap took some very nice pictures. Jaap & Mieke are leaving soon -- they'll take a cab at 12:30 o'clock. Their flight is around 17:00 o'clock, so there's plenty of time.

The crane being installed. It took several hours to put all the parts together.

Both cranes next to each other:

Our hallways is now being renovated as well. It looks really bad with the wallpaper of the walls, I hope they'll fix it soon.

While my parents are here my father is doing a lot of the cooking, and I really like it.

There are a lot of family recipes that he is making and that I hadn't had in a long time.

Favorites include omelet hete Sahara, couscous with sauce, and various nice salads. Tonight Jaap cooked beef with apricots in the oven. Delicious!

Yesterday evening we went out for dinner for work with a guest from Puerto Rico. We went to see the Capitol, and when I was there I remembered that my parents were planning to watch the concert that was being held there. I couldn't find them in the audience though -- would have been nice to surprise them there. Later they told me that they had changed there plans and went somewhere else.

We went for dinner in Georgetown, in Cafe Milano, a very nice Italian restaurant. I had the La Scala pizza, with arugula, an nice and interesting ingredient for a pizza. It was a fun evening. At a table behind us was Mr. Greenspan, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

My parents, not there.