On camp we had his thing where whenever something happened which seemed typically American we would yell ‘AH-MUR-I-CA’. Visiting Washington DC gave me a lot of stuff to yell about. It seemed that so much stuff was overly ornate and lavish. There was no such thing as a plain building there, everything had to be big and well refined. I spent my first morning seeing the stereotypical sites such as the Washington monument and the Lincoln memorial. I was disappointed to find though that the iconic reflection pool is current dug up as it’s being renovated.
My favourite part of DC was the Smithsonian museums. For those who are unfamiliar with them, they were started from a grant from the will of a British man whose son had no heirs. Today they do a lot of research in addition to running lots of museums and a zoo, most are located around the national mall and all are free to visit. The American history museum obviously had a lot of exhibits about American history. One of the more interesting exhibits was a whole house they had rescued from destruction which is now set up on it’s original settings with the stories of the inhabitants from the last 200 years written around the edges of the room. There was an extensive collection of memorabilia from past presidents such as the hat Abe Lincoln wore when he was shot and Bill Clinton’s saxophone. There were also quite a few pop culture pieces, my favourite being some original Henson puppets from ‘Sam and Friends’. The natural history museum had a lot about the living world. I quite enjoyed the sea creatures exhibit and (obviously) the dinosaur exhibit. The latter was also filled with most of DC, it was by far the busiest place in the city. I think many parents took their kids to just see that particular exhibit. As creepy as it may seem I was also loved the bones exhibit where they had the bones of a murder victim and a car crash victim laid out.
But neither of these museums had anything on the air and space museum. I don’t even know where to start with describing this place. There were two Apollo command modules (including Apollo 11′s) on display as well as other things that had been to the moon, I think these were the most fascinating. A lot of early/cold war space stuff was around, Mercury 7 was on the ground and visible from right up close. The original 1903 Wright flyer was in its own little exhibit. The Skylab walkthrough was pretty neat. Basically if you could think of something to do with flight from early war planes to modern commercial jets or to do with space it was on display there. I could have easily spent all day there but unfortunately I didn’t have the choice.
As I’m sure everyone has now heard an earthquake struck DC during the few days I was there. At the time I was in an exhibit about the planets standing directly underneath a replica satellite suspended from the ceiling. At first I was unsure of what was happening and by the short time it took to finish I had only just thought “earthquake”? By which point I looked up to see what was above me and saw the satellite rocking and flakes of insulation falling down. Shortly after that all the museums were closed.
The rest of my time in DC was not as eventful but still very fun. I ate the beat meal of my trip so far in Chinatown with a couple of fellow Aussies which I wish I had more time to visit again. On my last day I also managed to catch up with a whole bunch of mates from camp. So then on Friday I made my way to Baltimore.
There’s no nice way of putting this. I hate this city. I don’t know if maybe the weather had a hand in doing it but this place is really gloomy and dodgey. On the first day here I managed to catch a real live baseball game. I can totally see why people can get in to it. We saw the local Orioles vs the New York Yankees. The atmosphere there is pretty nice, although rivals there was no animosity between fans, it’s the sort of game you don’t need yo pay too much attention to so you can hold a conversation and it’s over fairly quickly. However I managed to end up trying to find my way back to the hostel with two English brothers, one who us a cop at home and managed to get held up earlier in the day. So it was quite a nervous walk back with none of us really knowing where to go and many parts of the city looking positively scary.
Then yesterday, again as I’m sure you read, we had hurricane Irene bearing down on us. Most places were closed early so we had a good old party in the basement. It was actually (well mostly) a lot if fun waiting it out with the other foreigners. Nothing eventful really happened in our area though we did have a lot of fun walking around today yelling ‘HURRICANE’ at anything we could remotely attribute to it. The biggest pain has been having all the busses cancelled when uwa as supposed to head to Philadelphia today. Hopefully I should be able to get out tomorrow so I can enjoy my two days there before heading to New York on Wednesday. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that the locusts manage to hold off.
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