i used to write in my old livejournal when i went to china on trips so here's my short spring break trip recounting. i'm in DC with my family and have been since Tuesday, with a long pleasant stop in the lovely city of Milwaukee Airport for about six hours since they cancelled our first flight in. it wasn't too bad, i read a book and looked at interesting clouds over the airport, though it did mean we had to pay an extortionist dressed up as a taxi driver to go six minutes to our hotel since we missed the complimentary shuttle ("and three extra dollars for the airport pickup, and three extra dollars for the luggage, and three extra dollars for the small person who you are travelling with!!" like an anti-oprah). the first recognizable thing i saw here in dc was the pentagon which i thought had a very militaristic and secretive air--though that may just be thinking. it's really odd to see a pentagonal building, architecture wise. it just looks like the building never ends, as you go around its faces.
anyway, we had no time to see anything that first night since we didn't get in until 11. but the second day we set out bright and early to go to (and this is where i can't remember where we went um...) the ART MUSEUM! okay i have to say how great it is that the smithsonians are all free. we were worried that the sequester might've closed them but they stayed open and they stayed free. how wonderful is that? and how appropriate? given the fact that the federal spending budget was $4 trillion last year, fuck yeah we should keep open these repositories of knowledge and history for everyone to come and freely learn from. i'll come down from the soapbox now. the art museum was beautiful in itself, architecture-wise (corinthian columns, thank you third grade greek history unit) and had so much art. i loved especially the pre-raphaelites exhibit, the sculptures, and the romantic landscape paintings. after that, we went to THE ZOO. i keep getting excited, that's why i keep capitalizing.
i love elephants. the one i saw was eating bamboo and breaking off the delicate leaves with its trunk by applying pressure with its foot on the stalk. saw clouded leopards, wolves, a bald eagle, a seal that looked sick :(, a lion trying to fish a piece of cardboard out of its pool, a spectacled bear, and other things which i can't remember. the pandas we went to see this morning, since they were gone by the time we got there yesterday. sadly, the panda was far away so i could barely (bearly, heh) see it but it obligingly walked tantalizingly closer then far away again and i got a few pictures. i tried not to see too many things through the camera lens and not through my eyes, but i still took a lot of pictures.
today we went to the natural history museum. my favorite part was probably, lamely, the gallery featuring the best nature photography of last year. also the geology exhibit. as the weekend draws near people have begun to flood into these touristy places and by the third hour of going through the museum i decided i never wanted to be in a room with more than fifteen people at a time ever again. time to escape. we had seafood at legal seafood restaurant, which was amazing (fried oyster! half a lobster! and my chicken wtf, fish sandwich which was the tastiest i've ever had), then returned to walk around national mall, having vowed off all museums for at least 20 hours. we walked to the jefferson memorial along the tidal basin, looked at the one cherry tree brave enough to blossom, and came back.
this is getting long, so i'll be done soon. it is unfortunately cold in dc, probably like 40 with the windchill so it's made walking around kind of unpleasant. it's also made the cherry trees kind of not-blooming, which was one of the whole reasons why we came to dc this break. alas. other than that, it's been really tiring, full days which go by too quickly and there's still more of dc to see. for example, the white house--i was astonished that the white house sat right in the middle of the city, since for some reason i remembered it being off in a more secluded area, and my mom decided that is just uneducated of me so we are going to walk by there. will wave to obama. oh, and the title for this post was obvious because really, dc does have the best metro train system i've ever experienced (out of beijing, shanghai, chicago, nyc, san francisco bart--no germany, which i've heard is excellent). the tunnels are high, the trains are wide, it's smooth and just so wonderful. it's crazy to imagine how they made the subway systems. what a feat!
excited for tomorrow.
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