Wednesday afternoon had beautiful blue skies, so went on a building and monument crawl - all the way up the mall to the Capitol Building, then all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end, then round the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial, and finally back to the hotel. I walked a *lot* that day!
Friday afternoon I did another building crawl, seeing the United States Supreme Court, Library of Congress, Union Station and the FBI Building. Being Friday and not a public holiday, the FBI building should have been open, but they decided to have a long weekend and were not reopening til Monday (I flew out first thing Monday morning). Bastards!
Saturday was rainy (really the only rainy day I had the whole trip), but was ok because spent most of it inside at the Natural History Museum. Lots of really cool stuff in here, I think I enjoyed this more than the Air and Space Museum. When I was done looking around I went to have lunch; there were no free tables so sat down at one where a guy was going to be leaving soon. We started talking (his name was Paul) and offered to keep me company out to Pentagon City and the Pentagon, after he had a look at the Hope Diamond.
Paul and I caught the train out to the Pentagon station (useless trivia - they have the same train ticket machines as Sydney), where I took a photo of the Pentagon in the rain (yay). The picture they have in the foyer is the best view you get of the building. They also have tours but being a Saturday they did not have any running. We then walked up to the Pentagon City shopping mall, then caught the train back into town. Walking past a hotel spotted an ice sculpture just sitting there, very pretty :)
Sunday was a bit of a writeoff. Washington DC is really a dump of a "city" - there is no "central business district", it's kinda like Canberra. And Sunday mornings are completely dead. Almost nothing is open before 10am with most stuff not opening til midday. I had nothing better to do so I walked several kilometres from one end of town to the other - to Georgetown. Then caught a bus back to the tourist area and took some more photos of buildings. The only interesting highlight of the day was seeing the original Magna Carta, Declaration of Independance, Constitution and Bill of Rights in the National Archives. Oh the other thing is, you can't walk more than a block or two at a time without being kicked off the footpath and told to walk on the other side. Every second intersection and footpath is torn up with orange tape around it. I don't know if it's like that all the time, but I found it rather frustrating.
