Sulkyblue's Blog

I've finally made a notable dent on my photos from Washington! Celebrations are somewhat limited as this happy occasion only actually marks about halfway through the collection, but I figured I'd post some of them anyway.

plenty more at flickr

It's been a beautiful beautiful day in Washington - 30 degrees, baking sun and blue skies all day. It felt a bit like a gift of a last burst of summer before the long dark winter.

We took a trolley tour today - like the bus tours in London you can hop on and off of, but with trolley cars. It w a good choice for the day as ithttp://www.livejournal.com/update.bml gave us plenty of opportunity to sit down and a quick overview of the city.

Washington is a very weird place, I suspect it's unlike any other city in the US, or possibly elsewhere, it's a designed and built capital designed to be a figurehead for the country. So every single building is bigger, flashier and shinier than it probably needs to be. Amongst the things we saw today were the Lincoln Memorial and the National Cathedral, both of which were practically shouting at the Europeans "look, we can do this too!". The National Cathedral in particular was hilarious, the tour guides made a big point of saying that they'd used all the authentic tools and techniques for a gothic cathedral, they were really proud of it. And I was buying it until I remembered that Europe had been doing that at for centuries!

All that said, the things were still very impressive and beautiful. We also went to Arlington which was very moving and lovely to walk around. It all gives a really interesting insight into America and it's people, what they memorialise, how they treat their dead and what statements they want to make. It's really interesting and when the statements they're making are "we're bigger and better than all of you" you've got some interesting things to look at!

We had a really wonderful day and have managed to stay awake until 8.30pm so far, although it was touch and go for a while and there was a real risk of falling asleep into our dinner. I was going to put a couple of photos up, but I don't think the wireless can take it or I'm awake enough to find a way to edit them on thi weird operating system.

Thing I learnt today:
Completely against your will, Extreme Makeover will make you sob uncontrollably.
Follow the cops to find good breakfast, sharing a diner with armed guards is weird, but the bacon is excellent.

Cool things
People on street corners selling bottles of water and ice cream know Everything!