Bullets and snow do NOT mix

So as you may have noticed, I haven't been talking about family for a while. Well, the beginning of my trip was saturated with family visits and I had planned this trip to take advantage of my close proximity to many amazing cities.

Many things have happened and it is really difficult to write down every single event and thought that has occurred in the last month.

I did find out that I have a cousin in Atlanta, but he was in Kentucky at the time.

There are four family members left on my schedule who are in Pennsylvania, My Aunt and her three daughters.

My next stop after Atlanta was Washington DC. A place where I was lucky to have someone show me around. This person happens to live in Columbia Heights which is right next to a historical black neighborhood in the dc area. When I first arrived, he knew exactly where to take me - Ben's Chilly Bowl.

I don't even like chilly all that much, but I guess the thing to order is the half smoke. A smokie on a bun with chili, my friend and I shared that and cheese fries. Mmm mmm good. Ben's chili bowl has a big colourful bear in front of it which gave me horrible flash backs to Vancouver street art they are using for the Olympics...shudder...anyways, happy thoughts. Ben's chili bowl is on U Street which was once known as 'black broadway' U Street is basically the epicentre of black struggle, freedom and prosperity through the arts and is booming with black businesses.

So we ate chili smokie dogs with 50 other people and listened to Micheal Jackson on the juke box.

I was able to listen to live jazz, go to a house party and my most favourite place was this amazing cafe called Busboys and Poets. My dream cafe really. Spoken word, a restaurant, coffee, beer, shrimp and grits on the menu, a radical bookstore and just a cool place to chill on comfy couches. It became our hang out, in fact, we were there that night it started to snow and it didn't stop for two days.
When I was in New Orleans, they said it would snow, when I was in Atlanta, they said it would snow and so when I heard the same thing in DC I was skeptical, but it did snow.

It was perfect timing too because my friend had the weekend off and all we did was stay in, eat good food, talk, listen to music and had a snow ball fight that got a little viscous. No kidding, it seemed everyone that day was out on U street throwing snow balls at each other, they were flying every where and some hit a man's wind shield to his car and well, he must have been having a bad day because he lifted his shirt to expose his gun.

What lesson do we learn from this folks?