The party moved outside last Sunday in Washington D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood. Washingtonians block partied international style at the annual Adams Morgan Day Festival, established 29 years ago to celebrate the neighborhood’s cultural diversity. And it was loud.
I strolled the neighborhood with my college roommate, who now lives there, and a friend of hers visiting from Kentucky. Our first stop: A section of Euclid Street where flamenco dancers in traditional polka-dotted dresses swished their hips and stomped their feet to the rhythm of a flamenco guitar and drum. Our second: The intersection of 18th and Columbia, where 20 musicians rocked their trombones and tubas back and forth in unison as they played upbeat New Orleans' style jazz. Further down the road, we sat beneath the hoops on the basketball court at Marie H. Reed Community Center, where West African dancers jumped and gyrated to live drum music, then invited the least inhibited of the crowd to join them. We strolled between the tents selling jewelry, African masks, alpaca skins and chicken on a stick, passed a trio of girls crooning a Third Eye Blind song outside Peyotes Karaoke Café, then decided maybe it was time to head home.