Ringing in the new year D.C. style.

If you read the novel of my last post, you'll know that Doug and I took a few days away from the homestead and visited Washington D.C. over the New Year's holiday. We were there for three full days and four nights. Just enough time to start to feel comfortable there, and just enough time to get enough of a taste to know that we'd go back in a heartbeat. In three days we were only able to see parts of two Smithsonians, the lobby of the Capitol building visitor center, the Lincoln, Jefferson, WWII, and Korean War Memorials, the Library of Congress Jefferson Building, the National Archives Rotunda (where they keep the originals of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Constitution), the outside of the White House, the National Christmas Tree, and lots of other buildings that we walked by, like the U.S. Treasury building, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the USDA, etc. We did eat in the Smithsonian's American Indian Museum, and I used its bathroom, but that's as far as we got there. There's really just so much to see. And I bet if I lived there, which I found myself instantly wishing would happen, I wouldn't see these things nearly as much as I think I would (but would still like to be near them. I could still absorb their karma and history through osmosis, I bet.). Needless to say, we had fun and really weren't ready to come back.

I took many, many photos, and a few videos, but will only post some highlights here. Someday the photos will get to my flickr page and you can see them all there, or else you can see them once I put them in a real, physical photo album (I have one of those for all the trips Doug and I have taken together; it's archival tradition) when you visit Dedham next. Let's start with the White House, the first stop on our whirlwind tour.

Doug stood in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and dreamed of being president. It happened once, so it can happen again!

I stood in front of Julia Child's kitchen at the National Museum of American History and was inspired to be great (or at least not burn so much of what I attempt to make).

We trekked out in the unseasonably chilly D.C. night to see the National Zoo awash in lights. The panda and the reptiles were our favorites (mostly because the other animals were all asleep and because of this rather boring).

Marvin was our restaurant of choice for New Year's Eve. Doug had scallops and I had steak. Doug prayed there would be enough Belgian beer to last the whole night (we managed to stay up until after midnight this year. Amazing!).

In the spirit of eating well in the U Street district, we had a New Year's Day dinner at Ben's Chili Bowl. The chili cheese fries were fantastic (even when I tasted them again the next day).


We became very adept at the Metro, despite getting almost stuck in the door. It's clean, fast, and makes sense. Beat that, T!

And, we marveled at how European the city felt, which makes sense, since it was modeled on great European cities like Paris. But look at this photo and guess where we are - we could be anywhere in Europe, but we're in front of the U.S. Capitol. How cool!

Rents in the city are outrageous, and to buy there we'd have to give up a lot (like all of our possessions and any kind of attachment to physical space or a place to park). But we can dream, right? And we can plan a trip back to the city to see all the things that we didn't get to see this time. Maybe I'll put that on my list of goals for 2010.