The Capital
We've been
in so many places in US but in capital. So, we took our friend and went
there for a couple days.
It was Thanksgiving
weekend,1999 and we didn't have turkey :( because of no good american company
around... Instead we had a short trip to Washington,
DC for two days. We were going in the our friend's car, so we were
not driving at all, just relaxing...
I found
that actually Washington is the only american city that has so many monuments
and memorials. And somebody told that Russia has many Lenin's monuments!
Washington alone has so many and so big monuments of the famous former
presidents. We saw couple of those like Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.
These are huge structures like Parthenon in Greece I guess. The statue
of Lincoln reminded me of the famous statue of Zeuss in Greece! Except
those memorials we saw famous US Capitol, of course. It looks interesting
but the line was too long that's why we didn't bother to go inside. Also
we've been around and inside(!) the White House. It was my crazy idea.
It took 2 hours to stay in a line to go inside and Mike was becoming angrier
and angrier during this time :( Anyway we walked through White House and
found that it's just a regular house, nothing special. Apart from this
there still were so many people in the city. And the guide said it's off
season time. What's about summer in this case? And the crowd was everywhere
in any place :( We saw the Washington monument that was on repair and looked
strangely. Mike insisted that we must go to the National
Air and Space museum (one of Smithsonian's museums). We went there
and there were 5 people per square meter I guess. I never saw so many people
in the museum! This museum has models of different rockets, planes and
even spaceships. Many of them are just models, some are real. We saw real
documents of our first cosmonaut Gagarin, some rich collector bought it
from Russian government! In my opinion, that was stupid move. The best
exhibition contained models of spaceships, cosmonaut's and astronaut's
suits and landing modules. Others were not so exciting. Finally Mike told
it wasn't so great as he expected :(
At the
end we drove to Virginia and saw walls (!) of Pentagon building (just to
tell everybody we saw it). I researched that it's possible to visit Pentagon
actually but you need to have advanced reservation and those tours conducted
according some complicated schedule. It's pity we didn't visit National
Museum of Art (I wish to visit it some day) but we hadn't much time and
the crowds of people made us crazy at the end...