The day in DC has been deadly tiring. We ave to admit that we could have used one more day to see the city calmly and to get to know Washington as a city and not only Washington as the capital of the USA.
Our day has started in the US Memorial Holocaust Museum with a very well organized exhibit on nazi propaganda. There were walls and columns imitating actual brick walls and columns full of nazi propaganda as well as interactive parts in whoch one could choose among different documentary videos, both old and modern, about the subject.
But that was it, the rest of it was a bit diappointing (besides, the exhibit itself was kind of propagandistic about Israel).
After the museum we went the the National Mall, crowded with monuments and official buildings: the Smithsonian (a bunch of free museums, although we didn't have time enough to visit them proprely), the Capitol (with both the House of Representatives and the Senate and with the Father's Day compulsory protest about shared custody and father's rights), the Congress' Libraries, the Supreme Court, the office buildings of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Washington's obelisk, the Tidal Basin with Roosevelt's Memorial, the WW2 Memorial (a good place for refreshing one's feet in the fountain), and finally Lincoln's Memorial, in front of which Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced his famous speech “I have a dream...”
Do you remember the huge pool between the Obelisk and Lincoln's Memorial? The one to which hippy-Jenny jumps yelling “Forrest! Forrest!” while Forrest Gump is talking to thousands of people about Vietnam? Well, it's not there anymore. Now there's a lot of mud and bulldozers in its place. Not a great view.
After the monument and government buildings marathon we decided to change the subject, so we went to the White House, where Obama welcomed us with tea, cookies and some snipers on the roof.
The truth is the actual size of the White House is way amaller than it seems on TV. It seems like poor Obama, the first black president of the USA, isn't even able to fit in his... famous oval table.
In front of the White House there were lots of tourists and small groups of demonstrators, among which there was an antinuclear camp made up by only one man who, apparently, has been there from 1982 (you could tell by his beard), an Asian woman singing fragments of the Bible while holding signs of “Obama fascist” and Israel flags, a goup of people from Bangladesh calling for democracy in Bangladesh and a guy wth some 15 signs of all kinds from Bin Laden to go vegan, gay marriage and free software.
And finally our first real stop: six o'clock dinner. As the whole day we had been visiting American monuments and since the prices in DC incite to fast, we decided to honor the world's most famous clown and eat a Big Mac.
After walking the embassy row, we arrived in Dupont Circle, a really cool neighborhood full of bars, restaurants, bookstores, cafes and people, where we walked around a little before heading to the National Mall again to see all the monuments at night.
We finally made it to the hostel, whose walls were covered in theatening signs describing the fines one must pay when doing anything inappropriate (this is, anything different from eating, sleeping, taking a shower and walking barefoot).
Next day (by the way, it was pouring) we caught the bus that would take us to NYC, but that's a different story.
(Washington's Obelisk at night)
(One of the Smithsonian buildings)
(Miguel pronouncing his very first speech at the Capitol)
(What was the pool next to the Obelisk)
(Nuria and Lincoln)
(Miguel screaming to the White House)
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