I thought this got blown up in Indepedence Day?
Washington Monument...how phallic.
We got caught in a freak rainstorm!
Capitol Building
Lincoln Memorial at night
After a long day of travelling involving two buses, two planes and a shuttle minibus, we eventually arrived in Washington D.C! With so much to see, we had to plan our 3 three days with military precision in order to see what we wanted. And see things we did! On our first day, we walked the 6 blocks or so down to the White House for photos, then headed over to the Washington Monument, which is massive. We didn't go up, just took many worm's eye view photos! Then we marched to the Smithsonian area, to see the Museum of American History. Unfortunately the museum is closed for renovation - but no fear! - they've moved their main exhibits over the Air and Space Museum, where we just happened to be going to anyway. This museum holds every important plane ever, I think. From the Apollo 11 command module to the actual Wright Brothers' plane, to the Spirit of St. Louis. And the American History section had some amazing stuff - from the start you had Lincoln's top hat, the original Kermit the Frog. There was also C3PO and R2D2, and one of George Washington's uniforms.
After doing the museums, we needed to update our blog, so went to an area called Dupont Circle, which is a very fancy residential area. It reminded us of Kensington or Chelsea. Big townhouses and trees and such. Swish.
The second day we started at the International Spy Museum, which was very well put together, with lots of crazy gadgets on display (flying pigeons with cameras strapped to them?). There was also a slightly scary room full of anti-communist displays, with titles such as 'The Red Terror', basically saying that all communists are also terrorists. Good to see the Cold War isn't completely over!
After the Spy Museum we checked out the National Archives, which contained many interesting things, including one of the copies of the magna carta. The queue for the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights was massive, and seeing as they don't mean quite as much to us Brits, we thought we'd leave those. You can buy copies in the gift shops anyway!
In the evening we befriended some Swiss girls and walked to the WW2 memorial, which looked good when lit up at night. We also came across a evangelical gathering by the Washington Monument, where far-right Christians were handing us leaflets. But we weren't interested in being converted - we just wanted to use their porta-loos!
On the third day we started at the Capitol building, which was all very patriotic, but very impressive inside. It was good to learn the history of the place (including how the British burned it to the ground!)
From the Capitol we had lots of time to kill (our bus left at 12.45am) so after gettign some Canadian dollars we hung around a coffee/book shop like the cosmopoliatan people we are, then headed to the Lincoln Memorial for some spectacular night time views (see photos!). We also found the creepy Korean War memorial - a dozen or so white statues stood in various poses across a grassy area - it depicted a moment mid-battle, I guess, but they looked like ghosts to me.
So after 17ish hours awake, we then had to get to the Greyhound station for our 19 hour cross-country ride to Canada!
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