Memorial Day

This is my third consecutive Memorial Day that I have not been able to celebrate in true Minnesota at the lake fashion, or really at all.

I spent this day these past two years taking a 6am flight to Anchorage and then sitting at the airport for hours waiting for someone to bother to pick me up (which in the case of last year, they never did). I am missing Anchorage so much right now! I never would have thought it possible after my god-awful first summer there, but the place has grown on me and even gotten in my blood a little bit. Maybe next summer I'll be cruising the coastal trail again on a garage sale bike and taking care of some pretty great people. At any rate, I hope to someday again be celebrating this day wearing shorts and eating potato salad outside in the near future.

The only way a person could know that it was Memorial Day here is because of the fact that the U.S. Embassy closed and there was a blurb in the paper explaining why the Americans weren't letting people apply for visas this Monday. They took some liberal quotes from a Bush speach and said that we all go to the cemetary and put up flags. Pretty much.

And what does the U.S. embassy look like? Kind of like a fancy warehouse, like a new one that hasn't had time to get really dirty yet. It's right in my neighborhood, away from the bustle of the city, and the only identifying marks are the small U.S. flag out front (by small I mean an eigth of the size of the flags the have at Perkin's) and "American Embassy" in tiny tiny print at the top of a sign with parking instructions.

In the late 1990s, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were almost simultaneously bombed by a group called al Qaida, and ordered by a man we would come to know well on September 11, 2001. These were some of his first attacks on American interests and helped his name to grow in media and political circles. Osama blew up about 300 Africans that day (the Nairobi embassy was next to a hospital that was heavily damaged) for the sole purpose of killing a few American employees. Since this act of terrorism, the Dar embassy was moved and made much more discrete to try and distance itself from the bloody recent past.