Washington DC

08/04/12-11/04/12

I arrived in DC in the morning having passed through the state of Maryland in the early hours. As I couldn’t check in till the afternoon at my hostel I went for a quick wonder of the local area to get my bearings. As I was walking I came across the National Achieves so with time to kill I joined the line to pass through security. This building holds all of America’s most important documents, none more so than the original founding documents including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They are housed within the buildings Rotunda so after joining another queue I finally got my chance to get to see these incredibly important documents with my own eyes. The major shock is how faded the Declaration of Independence is, it is almost ineligible to read or even see the signatures at the bottom of the page; years of sunlight damage have taken their toll. The other documents are thankfully in a much better condition, you cannot deny the important role they played not only America’s history but also their impact in the wider world.

On my first full day I headed immediately down to the Holocaust museum to take up my place in the line to get free tickets for the museum’s main exhibition. Luckily I didn’t have too long a wait till I could enter the main area so I quickly wondered around an exhibition of Nazis propaganda – that took me back to my secondary school days. When it was time I entered the main area of the museum that documents the Holocaust from the rise of the Nazis party through to the end of the war and the discovery of the camps. You cannot help but be moved by the images and films on show, from the footage of mobile execution squads and the conditions of camps to the pictures of those involved in ‘medical’ experiments, no matter how many times you have seen them they are still as shocking. In the afternoon I moved outside to explore the many memorials DC has to various individuals and wars. In the centre of the mall, a huge national park stands the Washington Memorial. It has a look out platform at the top but due to recent earthquake damage it is currently closed off to the public. West of it lays the World War Two memorial which stands at the eastern foot of the Reflecting Pools, though they weren’t reflecting much due to the fact that they were dry because of upgrade work. At their western end stands the Lincoln Memorial, an impressive tomb-like structure that houses a sitting statue of the former president along with some of his famous addresses. In the grounds nearby is the Vietnam memorial, a simple V shape line of black facings listed with the names of the dead. On the opposite side lays the Korean War memorial that has a series of white ghost-like statues of a unit out on patrol. Instead of names the memorial displays faces in various situations. Further around is the Martin Luther King memorial and the impressive Roosevelt memorial which displays various quotes from the former president in chronological order of his three terms. On the other side on the lake sits the circular Jefferson memorial. North of all this stretching off of the mall is the office of the current president – the White House. I headed there to try and get a picture of the front but due to a ticketed Easter event the whole front was blocked off so I had to settle with the view of the back of the building.

My second day consisted with museums. In the morning I made my way up to the top of the Post Office tower to get an overview of the capital before venturing down to the Air and Space museum, reportedly the most visited museum in the world. It contains a wealth of exhibits from the Wight Brothers plane that made the first powered flight in history to the Apollo 11 command module, there’s even a moon rock you can touch. After exhausting all the exhibits I made my way up the mall to see the mighty Capitol building where the senate is housed. It is an impressive structure, I joined the queue to visit but was refused enter because I was carrying a water bottle on me! Denied entry I instead popped into the Library of Congress to check out the impressive classical interior and Franklin’s book collection. On the north side of the mall I checked out the West Art museum quickly following the highlight guide they provided. With my attention span running out of patience I only took a quick tour of the Natural History museum next door seeing the massive Hope diamond in the process before retiring back to my hostel for the evening.

At the Air and Space museum the day before I had hope to see the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic weapon in history but I discovered it was housed at the museum’s sister site in neighbouring Virginia. Not prepared to miss one of the objects that I had always wanted to see I set out early on the third day to catch the first bus I would need to visit the site. After a lengthy journey consisting of two bus rides I eventually made it to the other site. Inside was the Enola Gay as well as hundreds of other important exhibits that simply cannot fit into the main site on the mall. It was certainly worth the journey and I had finally seen the plane I had always wanted to see. Back in Washington in the afternoon I visited the American History museum to see the original star spangled banner among other artefacts. After dinner in the evening I made one last visit to the mall to finally see the front of the White House as well as to see some of the memorials lit up, the Lincoln one in particular was quite spectacular under floodlights.