It's Snowing - How Capitol!

I have had every type of weather here in DC - from glorious sun and blue sky to pelting icy rain and SNOW! (Sorry for shouting, but I was a bit excited when it started to snow.) And while most of what I wanted to do here involved being inside museums... I also wanted to see the monuments, which isn't such a great thing in icy rain or snow!

The first place I went to was America's first modern art museum, which happens to be in the same neighbourhood as my hotel - Dupont Circle. This is a great area (and it seems filled with newspaper readers if the picture in the Blog Gallery is any indication), and houses all the embassies, so the homes are really swish. I like to walk around and imagine that I own and live in one of them (in reality I think they are now broken up into apartments).

The streets are laid out like New York and Philly with numbered and lettered streets (I am between R and S streets!) in a grid, but they are overlaid with diagonal streets radiating out from Dupont Circle. The first two times I tried to navigate from the Metro I got lost (the second time I even had a map!). It's so easy to take a diagonal and end up totally in the wrong direction. The third time, I just took a cab (and got invited to come to his house for lunch on Sunday)! So tonight I was quite pleased at finally navigating my way from Metro to hotel in the 4 short blocks that it is, and not turning it into 8-12 blocks as on previous days (always at the end of the day when I'm most tired too!).

Oh, but the museums. The Phillips Collection attracted me because there was a Van Gogh exhibition on (no photos allowed) showcasing the repetitions he did of his paintings (I had no idea he repainted some of the famous ones, like the bedroom at the yellow house in Arles). But they have some other amazingly well known paintings - you might be familiar with these two by Cezanne and Renoir (respectively)?

To counter all this culture, my next museum was the International Spy Museum, which is a lot of fun - even the bathrooms are in character! They like to say that Washington DC has more spies living in it than anywhere else. So the gentlemen that asked me today in Starbucks if I work for the big boss may have been trying to make contact (my answer probably should have been "Never on a Sunday, sir") and not the crazy homeless dude I took him to be?

So in the Spy Museum, you have to memorise an alias on the way in, and then you can take tests along the way to see if you remember your cover. I was Greta Schmidt, an astronomer on her way to London for business! Kept my cover impeccably the whole way through! ;-) They also had a Bond Villains exhibition with lots of artefacts from the movies over 50 years - I spent 3 hours in this museum and could have spent the day, I really enjoyed it (mostly because I like history and there isn't much of it that hasn't included spies!!!). Oh and tech gadgets and cool cars too!

A true challenge on my first day here was trying to see the White House, because the Christmas Tree lighting ceremony was on and all the roads were closed. I eventually found my way around to the front for this view in the pouring rain! It absolutely bucketed down, seeing how there isn't any cover for blocks!

The next day I managed to see the other side of the White House, with Xmas Tree and Menorah for Hanukkah (which was last week). This time it was in brilliant sunshine for a little while.

But first I made my way out to Georgetown, which is very pretty with all its old houses and canal. While waiting for the Stone House to open, I eavesdropped on another tour that pointed out that the area has always been about commerce (it currently is a shopping mecca for fashion, cosmetics, etc.). It was one of three original towns that made up the District of Columbia - now all merged into one metropolis. Anyway, the house was lovely, and dates to pre-revolution. It still stands due to a historical error - it was believed to be where George Washington planned his campaigns (that was in the house of this guy's father a couple of houses away - so understandable mistake!).

And as the sun was shining, I decided to take another walk along the Mall, past the Washington Monument this time and towards the Lincoln Memorial. I love the clouds and sky in this shot - amazing. Sadly the monument was also dressed for the cold!

Apparently the scaffolding is while they repair damage from a 2012 earthquake that loosened several of the stones. You should be good if you're coming here in 2014. I also saw the WW2 memorial (I notice that Puerto Rico and the Philippines are included with the US states...),

and reflecting pool, all of it looking quite sparkly in the briskly cold but gorgeous sunset.

The reflecting pool is longer than it looks, and I was worried at one point that I would miss the sunset and not reach the Lincoln Memorial in time. There was a fair crowd as you can see below, and ALL of them at one point stood absent-mindedly in front of my beautifully framed photos...

But all was good, and I got to see the seated man himself. And a lovely sunset over the Potomac River.

Today was such a contrast - awoke to light snow and around 1 degree, so lazed around in bed watching CNN for a while. When I wandered down to the local Metro station the snow was quite heavy. This station is very deep down as you can see here.

Sadly, when returning the snow and rain had shorted the escalators and I had to walk up these ones!!! It was 150 escalator steps (and they're steep!) and took me a good 5-10 minutes as I stopped to catch my icy breath every 30 steps. But seeing the Mall in the snow was pretty special. I was heading to the American Indian Museum which is up near the Capitol Building.

The streets were quite icy - being a Sunday, I don't think they were salted/cleared much in the area of office blocks between the metro and the mall. It was certainly a wintery view of the Mall out of the building.

And the streets were horrible on the way home. It stopped with the beautiful, fluffy, delicate snowflakes and replaced it with ice pellets. The footpaths were all crunchy with ice turning to slush, and my sneakers are so totally inappropriate and all slidey. I think a pair of Hunter Wellies might be my first stop when I get to London. I was relieved to get underground!

So, tomorrow I head across the pond to Old Blighty! I have only been in the US for about 2 weeks, but I have found that it has its own peculiar flavour, much as other countries do. I would have to say of all the places I've visited, I think more people here are less happy, even though they seem to have more. It could be because of the impending health care deadlines, but there are so many ads for health insurance and also for medications. They list all the side effects in the ads too - so they are like a hypochondriac's wet dream (although I'm yet to hear that as one of the side effects!). It seems that rather than avoid eating that spicy fatty meal, they would rather eat it and then take some medication for the heartburn, even at risk of blurred vision, increased blood pressure and hair loss! ;-)

Well, it's almost midnight and I have to work out how I can pack all these warmer clothes into my little suitcase. Tomorrow I plan to visit the Air and Space Museum - weather permitting, but will not post until I get to the UK. Until then - cheers! Aveline. xxx