'Where can I pay?'
'Restrooms are over there, Sir.'
I've now had two full days in which to savour the delights of DC, after getting here on Saturday afternoon. First port of call yesterday morning was the Holocaust Museum. It's all done well and tasteful enough but really I think it's just meant as a basic 20th century history lesson for anyone who might need it. After that I strolled over to the Washington Monument, which as anyone who's seen it will testify, is waaaay bigger than you think it's going to be. You see it from a distance and it doesn't look all that much, but then you walk towards it for ten minutes and realise you don't seem to have got any closer. It's 555 and a bit feet tall. From the Monument I walked down to the Capitol, via the WW2 monument. It was a baking hot day and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I got sunburnt but not painfully so. The whole 2 miles of the grassy stretch from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol is superbly clean and well-maintained, although the sense of tranquility was somewhat offset by the 'Rolling Thunder' bikers' parade rolling through town - hundreds and hundreds of Harleys, one after the other, drowning out even the sound of the airliners trundling overhead.
I also went to see the Vietnam memorial. It's surprisingly modest and tasteful - at no point is it too tall to reach the top of. They have laminated catalogues listing all the 50,000 names; out of curiosity I looked up how many men with the surname 'Major' died in Vietnam. There were six.
The various Smithsonian museums were pretty good, especially the Air & Space one, where I gazed at a paper and wood thing for quite some time before finally twigging that it was actually the original Wright Brothers machine and not a replica. Similarly they also had the original Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. My days as a teenage plane geek are not entirely behind me you know.
Today I went to see the White House. It was an anti-climax, much smaller and closer to the street than I was expecting. Thence to the Arlington Cemetery, which was enormous and pristine and quite thought-provoking. In some places the graves stretch as far as the eye can see, although it's set in hilly ground so you can't see them all in one go. Many of the headstones were accompanied by those of a wife - or, in some cases, wives (not concurrent I presume). I had been walking round a remote corner of the cemetery by myself for quite some time when suddenly I turned a corner and the gravestones were much newer - they had people around them, elderly couples holding hands, and young children sitting aside holding flowers and with reddened eyes. I kept a respectful distance.
Overall Washington is basically a bit of a dump, but it has more than enough buildings and monuments to hold the attention. It's also one of the few Western cities to have a cohesive architectural theme (neo-classical), which is preferable in some ways to mish-mash cities like London.
Can I just say, very quickly....Dirty Leeds Staying Down ha ha ha f****ing get in!!! Thank you.
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| Washington Monument, from the edge of its shadow |
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| Washington Monument, again |
