During our first few hours in the city we managed to hit up the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court. We made an effort to get into Capitol building, but they didn't have storage lockers and it turns out I was packing my Leatherman (multi-tool/pocketknife) so we had to forgo seeing that for the day. The Library was really cool, aesthetically it was lovely. The coolest part by far though was an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible they had on display (that was the first major book every printed with movable type) and across from it they had a beautiful bibleprinted by hand in roughly the same time (~1450) which was a neat comparison.
The Supreme Court was incredibly white. Painfully so in fact. Apparently it is made from American marble which is very bright. There was some interesting history of the Supreme Court within the building (most of which I have forgotten already) as well as a great tour of the actual court room where we got to learn how the court works now. Meg and I aren't really up and up on our political science and law so everything was really new to us. Apparently there are 8000 petitions to the Supreme Court each year and only about 80 are heard so it seems alot of work goes into whittling the cases down. Also, each "trial" is only an hour long, with half an hour for each to make their case. Obviously most of the work goes on before the trial and the half hour is just used for the judges to ask questions of each sides lawyers. I also learned that each state has their own Constitution. Who knew? Maybe Americans do.
The Supreme Court
After our visiting these major sites we experienced the first downfall of the U.S. capital. In the government area, there are no restaurants or markets or coffee shops. Just government buildings and maybe banks and what not. Basically, nowhere for us to get lunch. Actually I guess there are little, expensive cafeterias in the government buildings, but we are trying to save money where we can. Anyway, we walked our way to the closest market indicated in our guide book and had good hot dogs.
After our long march for lunch we made our way over to the national archives where we got to see original copies of the founding documents of the U.S.A. The Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and then the Bill of Rights. It was really interesting to read how it all came together and how basically they designed, from scratch (with some historical precedences), how the U.S. government would run. Something that stuck out was that they intentionally left the powers of the president a little vague, since they knew Washington would take the job and they trusted him to define the presidency.
I think one of Meg's ancestors might have modeled for this statue.
After getting hyped up on America we did a really long walk down to check out the Washington Memorial and then the Lincoln Memorial. With Americans' penchant for building things really big, I wasn't aware of how long the walk was going to be. I figured maybe a kilometer or something but in the end it was more like 3-4km from the capitol to Lincoln on his chair. Luckily there were people playing California kickball, softball and even Ultimate to entertain us as we walked by. By the way, I hadn't seen California kickball since I was in elementary school and seeing adults play it, I realized why. It was lame. We didn't see any home runs or anything like that and I feel like kicking that gigantic ball might be a recipe for a knee injury.
Proof Meg and I were actually in Washington, D.C.
Anyway, after doing a cruise around the Lincoln Memorial (quote in the Lincoln museum I had no idea would have come from Lincoln, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."), night was falling and we meandered over to the White House. Sadly we didn't get to see Obama outside doing anything cool or even his kids, maybe they have a backyard patio they hang out it at.
Lincoln Memorial
That was it for our first very full day in Washington. We headed back on the train and made our long walk, with Meg claiming near fatal exhaustion the whole time, back to the campground.
The next morning we were up again and on the train first thing. Our first destination was the Capitol. Again we waited in line for a bit only to learn that we couldn't take Meg's water bottle into the building, even though it was empty! I am not sure what the logic was behind that but I didn't think arguing about it would have much benefit so we headed off to have a strategy session. Meg was all for burying the bottle somewhere, I thought that was ridiculous, and might lead to us getting attacked by some zealous patriots (burying metal canisters might look suspicious). In the end we decided to go to the Library of Congress and rent a locker and then come back to the Capitol. That ended up being a really good choice as there is a tunnel from the library to the Capitol and we were able to bypass the big line up the second time. Anyway, after all that hullabaloo the Capitol was pretty unexciting. We did a tour which had as its highlight a room full of statues (two from each state) of famous Americans. I'm not much of a statue-of-mildly-famous-people sort of guy. There was an informative exhibition describing the history of congress and the Capitol which was good.
From there, we had a day full of Smithsonians! We spent the bulk of the day at the American History museum. I got stuck for an hour or so in the engine section. Starting from waterwheels and the different kinds of wheels and their efficiencies (I had no idea there was so much engineering that went into waterwheels) it went through steam engines and all the way through gas engines. It is always interesting to see how something we take for granted has evolved over the years. Aside from being interesting the engine area didn't have thousands of students oozing everywhere. I forgot to mention that earlier actually, everywhere we went in Washington there would be groups of forty or so kids with matching t-shirts on and their matching parents blocking the normal flow of foot traffic. It was irritating of course and you know I don't think they were learning a whole bunch, overhearing their conversation at the Vietnam War memorial, "Their is a BIG rift happening in the popular kids...." Gawd!
Kermit!
After spending time in the pop culture, Edison and electricity, and American wars exhibits (all well done) we made our way to National Space Museum. By that point we were completely tired out from all the reading, but that was okay, we just walked around looking at all the space ships which were well displayed throughout the building. From their we made our way back to the trains and then our campsite.
Space Shower
Space Rocket
Space Robot!
We were done with Washington but had one last stop on our way out of town, Mt. Vernon, the plantation home of George Washington. We had a chance to learn a light biography of the first president as well as see our first plantation house. We also got to see Washington's dentures which were pretty gross and looked really uncomfortable which they say is why he is never smiling in pictures.
George's House. Pretty nice.
Washington had been a great starting spot for our America tour, we are now armed with a wealth of American history knowledge.
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