May 5, 2008
Back from over there
I’ve just returned from a whirlwind trip to Canada (speaking at HICKTech in Owen Sound, Ontario) and Washington DC (visiting the Guardian America office).
Despite having flown into Washington Dulles airport and gone on to spend several days in Northern Virginia probably a dozen times or more over my tenure with AOL, I must confess that in all that time I only made it into Washington once - and even then only barely, for dinner in Georgetown. I had never seen the Whitehouse, Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Capitol Building, any of the monuments, and had no taste of the city, really.
In the last few days, I have compensated for this tragic oversight, and have the blisters to prove it.
Things which Washington D.C. has a lot of (based only on my limited experience)
- School groups on tours, in matching t-shirts
- Big white marble monuments
- Museums, mostly free (and also the Newseum: recommended)
- Hyperbole
- Smart twenty-somethings
- People in full military uniform
- Embassies (my hotel was next to the Senegalese embassy, and just around the corner from Poland and Peru)
- Free Wifi
- Escalators
- Concrete (especially in use in the design of the metro system roofs)
- Countdown crossings
- People who might be secret service or might just be very well put-together tourists hanging around major monuments
- Pollen
- Bus tours
- Political tchotchkes
- Tour guides wielding light-sabers (especially at night)
- Humidity
- People visiting from the midwest (and specifically, members of tour groups from Kansas who thought that being British meant I was some sort of alien and would not have heard of everyday idioms, and so insisted on trying out a stack on me over breakfast: “We have a saying, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ - do you know that one? Oh. Okay, we have another one you might not know: ‘put up or shut up’. Have you heard that one? Oh. What about ‘elevator shoes’? Do you know what they are?” etc)
Things that Washington D.C. doesn’t have much of (again, based only on my limited recent experience)
- Water pressure. The showering experience leaves something to be desired - somewhat akin to having an old lady dribble over you. You’d think the capital city of The Most Powerful Nation On Earthtm, which, according to the National Air and Space Museum, managed to put a man on the moon, would be able to manage to put a quantity of water at head-height. No wonder they’re so cranky.
Well, let’s draw a discreet veil over what Bob tried to say.
A few things struck me about DC:
The Smithsonian museums are great. I was last there just before the Native American museum opened, so I can’t comment on what it’s like, but it’s righted a huge wrong for me. When I first visited DC in about 1990 I was surprised not to find anything about the Native Americans in the Museum of American History, and then shocked to find them next door in the Natural History Museum - along with all the other animals…
The Vietnam war memorial is very moving. It’ll be interesting to see how they acknowledge their military dead in the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts.
The Zoo is brilliant, mainly because entry is free! What a place to be able to take small children on a daily basis.
The Department of Motor Vehicles is fab. I had my hire-car towed from outside the Air and Space Museum and a $100 ticket slapped on it, but had a legal hearing THE NEXT DAY and was let off because I had photographic evidence that the no-parking sign had been bleached into illegibility by the sun.
They have four proper seasons.