Day Four

Day Four

Woken again by the workmen renovating the building, sigh, at 7.30am, sigh.  Have posted some feedback to the owner saying it really shouldn’t be rented out with this level of construction work, as we also came home to a fine layer of dust over EVERYTHING as it has sneaked into our apartment under the rather large gap in the door.  If we’d known we would be back to living in a building site we would have paid extra for a motel.  Anyway, that forced another early start to the day, so we wandered into Georgetown which is a rather quaint and historic area of Washington.  Thankfully the shops weren’t open yet, it looked to have some interesting stuff in the windows.  Then we made our way to the Second Storey Bookshop that Joe had sussed out (there is ALWAYS a 2^nd hand bookshop nearby) and then caught the metro into the Smithsonian.  This time we went to the natural History section, which was all in all rather disappointing I thought.  Much smaller than I was lead to believe, and with less exhibits than I was expecting.  Went to the butterfly pavilion where you can walk amongst the butterflies, which was pretty cool, though again they had less variety/numbers than I expected.  Maybe I’m getting to hard to please in my old age.  I just thought that the Smithsonian was the museum to top all museums, and while they have a few cool one-of-a-kind things, all in all, it’s not as impressive as I expected.  Maybe I have already been spoiled by what I have seen elsewhere.

After lunch we dragged our weary feet to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial down by the Potomac, and on the way back stopped at the United States Holocaust Museum.  It was a pretty comprehensive and impressive exhibition which followed the rise of Hitler and the advent of “The final Solution”.  Interesting to note that only 51 Danish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, as the Danish government went to extensive lengths to ensure their safety, including building boats to ship them to Sweden which was a neutral country, and paying the equivalent of $600 per person to ensure their safety.

Then I left Joe to have another foray into the Air & Space museum, while I made my way home to our building site.  We are staying on Washington circle, which as the name suggests is a circle of road which has 8 other roads/streets feeding into or out of it.  Almost directly across from us is the George Washington University Hospital Emergency Department, so that accounts for the seemingly endless sirens.  Tonight the traffic outside is bedlam, it’s been jammed solid since I got home just after 5pm and the horns have been honking constantly.

Random observations about Washington, people drive using their horns A LOT, lots of black and latino workers in the construction/service industry, and a very efficient and easy to use underground train system.  There is also a very large and noticeable Police presence here, I guess to be expected given it’s the seat of Government.