The Tombs, Georgetown, D.C.

Yesterday was a Georgetown day. This is one of those odd weeks when most of the students are gone, but the seniors are still hanging around in anticipation of commencement ceremonies on Saturday. The main lawn on campus is covered with folding chairs and they are building the dais for the platform party. Lots of students are running around the shops and the restaurants with that bittersweet, desperate, hungry look, trying to experience everything the Georgetown community has to offer before they leave town to start their new lives, wanting to remember the comfort of their fostering mother yet excited and anxious to spread their wings.

The Tombs is a popular restaurant on the edge of campus in that zone where university-owned and privately-owned properties mix side by side. It has a mixed clientele of students, university community, alumni, and neighborhood people, and usually it's a pretty busy, noisy place. So, since I was in the vicinity, I popped in for a snack.

The food is always fairly basic, though they do have a number of more upscale entrees these days. I got a cheeseburger with Swiss cheese and some fries. I'd seen a burger at a nearby table that was practically mooing, so I ordered mine medium-well; good thing I did, too, since my medium-well arrived well on the rarer side of medium; that's always a challenge with thick burgers, though. My companion got a chicken basket with breaded, fried, white meat and fries.



After eating, we walked down to M Street to the Haagen-Dazs store, where they were having "free ice cream day" and giving away free cones of their new flavor, vanilla honey bee. This summer, they'll be donating part of their profits from the sales of vanilla honey bee to research to solve the hive collapse disorder problem we've been seeing all over the country that's threatening our wild honey bees, impacting not only honey as food, but bees as a critically important pollinator for agricultural crops. They even had an apiarist in the store with literature to talk to people about honey bees.