The past week has been spring break here, where students traditionally go off into all four corners of the world (corners on a sphere?) and party, get drunk, do charity or mission work or combinations thereof. I went with the Wesley Foundation to Washington DC. We were there for a serious reason which I’ll get to in the next post, but for this one I’ll concentrate on the slight seeing and stuff.
Sightseeing in DC is really easy, as it’s really rather small. I didn’t realise this until we arrived, transitioning from “forest in the middle of nowhere” to “oh look, the Washington Monument” in matter of minutes. All of the museums, memorials and government buildings are within walking distance and there’s a metro if you don’t want to walk.
The night we arrived, after food in Chinatown, we had a wander down to the Washington Monument, America’s giant middle figure to the English, and had a look around. It looks small form a distance, but it’s really rather big when you get closer. After that we had a walk around the National Mall (not a shopping centre), planning where we wanted to go during the week, The layout is quite simple: There’s the Capitol at one end, then a stretch down to the Washington Monument lined by the Smithsonian Museums (lots of them ). Beyond the monument you can walk one way to the White House, or the other way to the various memorials.
The next day was Sunday, so we went to the service at the church we were staying in. It was a Lutheran church, the first I’d been to, and I quite liked it. It was probably the closest service to what’s normal at home, a proper hymn sandwich, although they had a sung liturgy. After that we headed to our first museum, which was the one I was most wanted to get to: The Air and Space Museum. It’s a fantastic place, with a collection of planes and spacecraft like no other. Almost all of them are famous, or were the first to do something. Some examples: The Wight Flyer (first plane(maybe)); Bell X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier in level flight; Apollo 11, the first spacecraft to land humans on the moon, although only the small command module came back; and the backup of Skylab, America’s first space station. I almost missed my personal highlight of the museum: Off on one side in the atrium is the Stardust capsule, the first mission to return comet dust to earth and one of my favourite space missions.
In our free time the next day we wondered around taking pictures of the Capitol, which is an amazingly photogenic building, then investigated the Museum of Natural History. Lots of interesting stuff, including a large bird fossil from the one short time when birds where the dominant animals, as well as a giant squid.
Next day we went to the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world with a very interesting exhibition on the creation of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, the founding documents of American history. I got to see the documents themselves a coupe of days later at the National Archives, where I spent most of the time trying to work out if a National Treasure-style theft was possible (not really, the film took quite a few liberties in it’s portrayal of the Archives.)
That night we went to the White House, which is small and hard to get a good photo of, then moved on to the Memorials. There are quite a few of them, the largest being the Lincoln Memorial. This was very reminiscent of the Parthenon in Athens, with a giant statue of Lincoln looking out over Washington. I’ve been reading a lot of books by Shane Claiborne, in which he talks a lot about the “State Religion of America” and that place felt eerily like a temple. Impressive though, although the next memorial was better.
When the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial opened last year I was quite disappointed by what I saw of it. The sculpture was quite good but it seemed a bit small compared to the others. What I hadn’t seen was the setting. The sculpture is carved out of a cut out of a bigger rock behind, which made it look slightly as if it had just rolled out from where it had been. (This led me to ponder whether or not it was, in fact, motorised, allowing the President to sneak down at night and drive it around while no one’s watching. The more I pondered this, the more it looked like a giant dalek. Apparently this train of thought either makes me a really good American or a really bad American, according to my friend Dan.) Spread out on either side is a curve wall inscribed with quotes from some of his speeches, many of which were quite profound. I think it was a perfect monument for MLK, focusing not on him as a person but on his work and words. It’s defiantly my favourite of the monuments that I saw.
Other sights included the National Building Museum, where there was a Lego architecture exhibition, and the Museum of American History, which had Lincoln’s hat, as well as John Glen’s spacesuit. We also had a trip up to Arlington Cemetery, where many US military casualties are buried, along with John F. Kennedy and his family. We attempted to stay solemn for once and not make any jokes about what we were seeing. This lasted until we got to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at which point Dan started a sentence with “I’m a bad American, but…” and it was down hill from there.
And then uphill again to the US Marines Memorial, based on the famous photos of troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima. There was one thing really out of place though, or in just the right place depending on your point of view. Rising up behind the memorial was a big black building with “BAE Systems” written on the side. A cemetery full of those killed in war next to a corporation that makes money from war. I didn’t have any spray paint with me, which stopped me making my second risk of getting arrested that week (I’ll get to the first time).
Overall I really enjoyed my spring break. Washington DC is a very interesting city, well worth going to. But I wasn’t just there for sightseeing. What we were really doing there, as well as an explanation of the title of this post, will have to wait until tomorrow. Come back soon…
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