five glorious days in d.c.

Thursday, March 3
First leg to Chicago pleasant and uneventful, despite in-flight movie Shall We Dance. On second leg, meet a media consultant for the Labor Department. We talk about the books we're writing. She's doing a memoir. She seems a more experienced writer, although she does not seem to be interested in fiction. I guess D.C.'s not that kind of town.
Arrive Reagan (National) Airport near midnight. It's cold. David picks me up, and we drive over to Kabob Palace. After waiting forty-five minutes, we finally get our food. It's pretty tasty.
Wake up Eric when we get in. Chat a little, go to sleep.


Friday, March 4
Sun's shining; not so cold. Pick up Kiat around 11 from Reagan (National) Airport.
Iwo Jima Memorial. Try to identify all the marine engagements on monument. Operation Freedom not on there, Kiat suggests they're waiting for it to end, so it'll be cheaper to carve the beginning and end dates at the same time.
Lunch in Alexandria. Visit old torpedo factory - now art gallery mall - by the water. Marvel at pretty old houses.
National Building Museum. Impressive atrium, but not much else. Temporary exhibit on concrete, sponsored by a French concrete supplier, not too informative. Finally saw fiber-optic concrete though, and that's kinda neat.
International Spy Museum. Very slick, professional actors in multimedia presentations, vintage Hollywood swag, lots of Cold War spy doohickeys, but rather low on content. Slightly right-wing take on history off-putting compared to liberal cast of most museums. Stasi HQ in East Berlin was cooler, even though it had less stuff. Almost buy red Che Guevara tissue pack, but that's a little too ridiculous for even me.
KBBQ for dinner. Veg out rest of night watching Larry David and Dave Chappelle.


Saturday, March 5
Warming up outside. Eastern Market. Chocolate fondue for brunch.
Library of Congress. Tres cush. Decoration of main reading room a tad bourgeois. Supreme Court. Looks rather small, but David tells me it's a big step up from the U.S. Capitol basement where they used to sit.
National Gallery of Art. No time to see most of it. Crawl around East Building. Only two tiny exhibits open - the rest is empty space or closed off. Rush through main building to see the exhibit on the photographer who used to live in David's parents' apartment in Greenwich Village.
Coffee at Union Station, before we wave goodbye to Kiat.
Georgetown. Large part of campus is pretty new. Dorms seem like dorms on any American campus. Dining halls are much nicer than what we got in school. Neighborhood is quaint but spooky, like a possessed Greenwich Village. Looking for Exorcist Steps; not sure if we pass them. Yuppie M Street is buzzing, and makes for a nice stroll.
Pizza for dinner in some 'burb. Good crust.
Watched Bruce Almighty on cable.


Sunday, March 6
Pho for lunch at Little Saigon in Great Falls. Drink lackluster boba smoothie.
Annapolis and the Naval Academy in the afternoon. Annapolis is dinky, especially for a state capital. Charming and atmospheric, especially with all the sailors walking around. The campus is spartan, except for the single dormitory, which is Soviet in scale and grandeur. Docent describes the quaint ritual where graduating seniors strip down, lather a large obelisk with lubricants, and then spend the next few hours climbing on each others backs trying to mount the obelisk. We leave campus at this point.
Dinner at a Syrian restaurant back in David's neck of the woods (actually, Adams-Morgan). Not very memorable. Lots of thirty-somethings in this town.


Monday, March 7
David's working today, so it's back to the Mall today.
Corcoran Gallery. Some forgettable artwork in a beautiful Beaux Arts building. Nice exhibit on Frank Gehry, who's designed a new wing for the Corcoran, in his now-familiar titanium-bedsheet style. Then it's wandering around the White House, Old Executive Office Building, and then a glance at the Octagon Museum, which is closed today. Walk by the Office of Thrift Supervision, which I assume has nothing to do with cutting federal spending.
WWII Memorial up ahead, smack in the middle of the Mall. It's highly reminiscent of the Soviet WWII Memorial in suburban St. Petersburg, sans underground museum. Nice integration of fountain with the reflecting pool. All the "et cetera" states are clustered on the Washington Monument side - not sure what this means. A group of vets is visiting the Memorial. When the call goes up for all WWII veterans to gather for a picture, only three or four, out of a crowd of white-hairs, qualify.
Lincoln Memorial. Seen it before, so I'm just here to get some shots of commercial jets buzzing the Memorial on the way to Reagan Airport.
Vietnam War Memorial. Still the classiest structure in the city, although maybe a little too austere for my taste. Liked the statues of grunts looking toward the wall.
Korean War Memorial. New since my last visit. Extremely photogenic. I feel like I'm in a war movie... a Vietnam war movie. According to the stats on the fountain, a LOT more UN troops died than US troops. Didn't know that.
Local Memorial to the Great War. Deserted. Nice quiet place to take a breather.
Freer Gallery. Like the courtyard. Art is forgettable, including the Peacock Room.
Sackler. Now this one I really liked. Excellent split-level, four-story, mostly underground atrium with a monkey ladder stretching from skylight to fountain at the bottom. This is the building I always wanted to build. Nice exhibit on the history of games in Asia. Connects on third and fourth levels to Freer Gallery, African Art Museum, International Gallery, and Smithsonian Institute - would love to play paintball there after hours. Nice travelling exhibit in the International Gallery on 20th Century Russian portraiture, from the Tretyakov Gallery.
National Gallery Sculpture Garden. On the way back to the Metro, stopped off, and was pleasantly surprised. People are skating in the ice rink, despite the pool of water in the center caused by the freak warm weather. For once, I liked the modern art around the rink, especially Liechtenstein's House and the Spider.
Dinner: Pan-Asian @ Raku. DC has gone al fresco in the seventy-degree air. Raku is expensive, Americanized, and some of the orders were screwed up. Not bad though. We grab a six-pack from the corner liquor store just before it closes (at 9pm!). Meet up on the roof of a friend's apartment, with an awesome 360 view of northwest D.C. Windy up there, and it's starting to get cold, so we headed down to the friend's spartan apartment. Everyone had to work tomorrow though, so we packed it up early.


Tuesday, March 8
Temperature plummets overnight. Pouring rain that stops in the early morning. It stops because it freezes, and I wake up to snow. Stepping outside, the snow is blowing horizontally. Struggle the three blocks to the Air & Space Museum. Computer is down, so they write out my shuttle ticket by hand. Bonus: it's only $7 roundtrip. Missed the 10:30 shuttle, so I hang out for an hour browsing the circa 1970 displays. New Wright Bros. exhibit is nice, but the Flyer is so gussied-up only the presence of guards hints at its authentivity.
Hour-long shuttle to the new Udvar-Hazy Wing at Dulles. Lots of great planes in the hangar. Ex-Navy fighter pilot gives us a tour, feeding lots of interesting tidbits about the history of combat aviation and the space program, as well as the big ticket items like the SR-71 Blackbird, the Enterprise space shuttle, and the Enola Gay. Definitely recommend taking the free tour. Well worth the trip.
American Indian Museum. Beautiful building, kinda like what the Guggenheim would look like if it was built today (by Frank Lloyd Wright, not Frank Gehry). Head straight to Native Foods Cafe, which is disappointing. Fry bread and enchiladas are the only remotely native foods items on the menu, and the sour cream did not help things. Gave up pretense, and enjoyed my brownie. Exhibits even more content-free than the Spy Museum, as the curator seems to be more interested in being politically correct than academically rigorous, or spatio-temporally coherent.
Back to National Gallery Sculpture Garden, to photograph it in the snow.
National Archives. Still a few more minutes before closing, so I pop in to refresh my memory of our founding documents. I forgot they had deteriorated so: barely legible, with the entire center of the Declaration of Independence faded away.
National Cathedral. Nice, big, Gothic cathedral. Nothing special. Not sure if it's worth the two-mile walk in the icy wind.

Off to Dulles, in-flight movie Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and that's it.

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