Washington DC - Day 1

The 1st of July is Canada Day - we chose to celebrate the brilliant country that we live in by visiting somewhere else.  Gotta take advantage of those long weekends when you have them!  We spent the 3 days in Washington DC, which is actually my new favourite American city.  

We arrived on Friday night and went out to grab dinner - and when we stood up to leave and looked out of the window, there were trees down outside and it was pouring down.  When I say pouring down, I mean the kind of weather where it looks like someone is literally tipping a bucket from above.  We waited half an hour for it to stop, and eventually gave up and ran back to our hotel, arriving looking like we'd gone for a swim.  It turns out that the weather was more serious than we knew at the time - the storm killed 22 people and took out power to 3.7 million.  Apparently the type of storm is called a derecho.  The aftereffects that we saw were mostly downed trees - including a bunch of huge ones that we had to clamber over while running on Sunday morning.  It was pretty crazy.

On Saturday morning we headed out to take in the sights, and there was no sign of the storm - blue skies.  The weather was brutal in a different way, however - it was 41 degrees in the shade for most of the time we were there, and there wasn't a whole lot of shade around.  It felt like we were walking around in an oven at times, and I got very sunburned despite copious amounts of sunblock.  That said, the city was beautiful.

We spent the first day walking around the National Mall area, which is the place that you see mostly on TV when they have big rallies in DC.  It contains many of the famous memorials and monuments and is about 3km from one end to the other, with a wider path around the river that houses some of the others.

The Capitol Building.  The architecture in the entire city was just amazing.  Beautiful buildings everywhere.

The Washington Monument, complete with American flag.  If you look halfway up just above the flag, you can see some cracks in the side of it - they're from the 5.8 earthquake in Virginia in 2011 that we felt in Toronto.  Apparently you can normally go up the monument, but those cracks have put an end to that for a while.

Washington is a designed city much like Canberra (only much better), and you can tell.  For example - the Washington Monument is in the middle of the National Mall, and each direction shows one of the city's important building.  This photo is looking west from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.  The view from the east is to the Capitol Building.  To the north, you can see the White House, and to the south you can see the Jefferson Memorial across the water.

The National Mall is also home to war memorials.  The WWII memorial is fairly new.  This wall is called the Freedom Wall (very American), and has 4,048 stars on it - each star represents 100 Americans killed or missing in WWII.

The rest of the WWII memorial.

The Vietnam War memorial is a reflective list of the names of soldiers.  There were a lot of names.

The Lincoln Memorial from the outside.  They really know how to make impressive memorials in America.

The Lincoln Memorial from the inside.  Lincoln was smaller than I thought he'd be.

Looking back down the mall from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - that's the Washington Monument, and then the Capitol Building at the far end.

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is an engraving showing where Martin Luther King Jr stood to give his famous "I Have A Dream" speech.

The Martin Luther King Jr memorial was only opened a year ago.  Apparently he's the first African-American to have a memorial in the National Mall area.  I really like the design of the memorial - the engraving on the side of the rock containing him says "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."  One of the really interesting things about visiting Washington DC for me was learning more about slavery, the American Civil War and segregation - it isn't something we ever really learned about in Australia as there was never slavery there (and I grew up in a very very white city).  I still have trouble understanding the concept and how people could ever think that one person was inherently lesser than another.  We didn't get a chance to go out and see the battlefields from the Civil War, so I hope to go and see those another time.

 The Franklin Roosevelt Memorial.

The design of his wheelchair, which he apparently made himself.

I find it really interesting that he is nowadays always shown in a wheelchair, but apparently at the time, it was a great secret, and he was very rarely photographed in a wheelchair or depicted as being anything except normally mobile.  I wonder if a Presidential candidate being in a wheelchair would be a problem today.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first American delegate to the UN.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial - excerpts from the Declaration of Independence of which he was the principal author are written on the wall behind him.

More to come on Day 2 and Day 3.