Washington and Columbia
hokay, so here i am quite intoxicated from the evening, not day, of today’s magical adventure. this morning we got up at about 9:30am, after we had said to one and another that we would get up at 8am, but somehow this did not work out as planned. not to worry though, we got up, jumped into the car and (after a quick stop over at safeway for some supplies and tape to hold the phone / satnav / e-mail terminal / musicplayer / kitchensink to the dash) drove up to the smithsonian museum in the nation’s capital. it was wonderful - we first went to the space and aviation museum on independence ave. we got there on a monday and reasonably early, so we could find a parking spot right at the entrance. unfortuately, they took quarters and dimes for some insane rate, so we could only fork up about a dollars worth, and so we parked for an hour planning on staying there only for breakfast, and using our change to stay there for a bit more.
funny story - paul and i went in to have breakfast, and of course this was “american food” which meant either mickey D’s or some rancid foodstuff that one might consider American Dining[tm]. So after looking around a bit I decided for the quarter pounder McD and Paul thought “oh no not again a burger” so he ordered a random sandwich which turned out to be completely horrible - and Paul left about 33% of it laying on the tray ready for tossing into the proverbial bin..
so we got our change, dropped it into the into the meter, and allowed ourselves 2hrs to see the smithsonian museum for aviation and space. it was -awesome-. Marina and I went to the Tech in San Jose, but it was terrible: a lot of displays were broken, badly lit, very poor overall - this one however was very very good - a lot of real life planes, air craft, space craft, a replica of the UCCP first lunar mission, apollo 11 (or 17, we forget… oh wait Paul looked it up, it was 11 after all) and a lot of really awesome displays of space and avionics. I particularly enjoyed the engine technology, coming from the early days, and leading up and until the hubble satellite which, I might add, is considerably large. We took many awesome pictures - which we’ll try to post tomorrow on the picasa page.
then, we drove our car to a car park up northwest of the white house, parked it (for 20$ OMG) and walked over to the white house, took the pictures we need to take to feel like real tourists, and walked down the green medow-‘y parks to the american mall -and then to capitol. but while we were at it, we may as well have visited the great american history museum (also a smithsonian institute) - and we loved it! it was very meticulous, full of history and details. we learned so much about presidency, technology, people and the things that make america the great nation it is today. thank you, institute, for teaching us these things!
from the smithsonian we walked to the capitol, a huge building, again full of snipers and guards, but otherwise quite friendly for tourists, and took some pictures (with normal cam and the fish eye lens). And then we cabbed it back to our car on 2021 K street.
then, we made the big mistake of the day- we decided that it would be hip to go visit the pentagon. okay, so we drove down there, and saw it, well, one of its faces, while driving on a highway, and there was not an offramp that we could take, and all in all it took about 15 seconds until we were forced back on the highway. shit. oh well. so we put the victoria gastro pub (in columbia, MD) into the nav, and it happily sent us back up north. through the city. at about 5pm.
so yes, unfortunately, we were in traffic for about 2hrs on an otherwise “short” 35 mile trip from dc to columbia. man, this took /for ever/ to get there. once we passed through washington and up north to baltimore things progressed ever so slightly better, but it was still rough riding through.. but then we met with jason, johan and devon; three openbsd type folk who paul knows on-line. we had a wonderful dinner in the gastro pub.
this gastro pub, i will have you know, is also famous for its beers: many belgian, american, australian, german, and so on beers in bottle and on tap; we drank many of them. i had the “american dip” which was a sandwhich of sliced rib-eye and american gravy (very yummy) and paul and others had duo-of-beef, which was “vezeltjes vlees” and a piece of good beef filet and some potato gratin. all in all, very well done. and with good beer. did i say the place is famous for its beers?
our server, a girl called gillian (sp? but I will call her G from now on) was really great and our guy devon liked her. well, we all did, but he did dig her a bit more :) so we stayed after hours and asked her out for a drink - she did and we ended up with the four of us (devon, paul, G and me) talking about all sorts of stuff: life, studies, growing up, our road trip, europeans vs americans, and many other things. it was really great - and I gave G our blog site and she said she’d read up: so if you do, G, this shot out is for you baby <3
then, drunk (me) and ready to go (paul) we left at about 1:30am and got at the hotel at around 2:15am. It’s now 2:30 and I’m done writing this. Tomorrow we head off to nashville (TN), not knoxville cuz my buddies at work say the latter sucks :) See you around!!