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My peregrinations brought me to DC Sunday, on an unexceptional if kind of long Amtrak ride (7 hours from Boston.) I'm actually staying in Arlington, which means I can add Virginia to my lists of states visited/slept in. Due to, um, high uncertainty at work, the week has basically been vacation.
Monday: Smithsonian Zoo. Decent, decent size, and free. Cold and vet meant a bunch of animals were out of sight, but I got to see all seven Asian elephants, quite a lot of gorillas and orangs, and some decent small mammals, including the always-cute and always-mobile sand cats. There were a couple of beavers, one of which kept attacking a metal door; I don't know if it was trying to get in for food, to go inside, or get to a female -- a third beaver was found on the other side.
The zoo also had a T. Rex skull, with conservation information of "Extinct"; I sent a picture to a friend, who replied "Are you okay???", I guess worried that I was feeling extinct. I just thought the info was hilarious.
Tuesday: Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Pretty big. I think I managed to eyeball most of it in three hours, but that's with a hall being closed, and some pretty superficial eyeballing. I spent particular time in a mosasaur room, Mud Masons of Mali, African Peoples in general, and Human Origins. Mosasaurs are apparently overgrown monitor lizards, which I found kind of funny. Pterosaurs are archosaurs, like dinosaurs and crocodilians; plesiosaurs were apparently some whole other branch of reptiles, on the same level as archosaurs, turtles, and lizards.
Wednesday: mostly veg, with a bit of going out for restaurant food and shopping.
Thursday: long walk through Arlington, largely trying to find parks, even though nothing non-evergreen is green yet. I did find a couple parks that probably will be nice later, but my overall reaction to Arlington has been 'meh'.
Friday: long walk through DC proper. Got out at Metro Center, walked east along H street; very monumental even without actual monuments. (I.e. big buildings with little retail.) Chinatown has the standard gate and like a street or two of businesses, it's tiny. After consulting satellite views a bit, I jumped over to Dupont Circle as looking more residential/mixed than downtown DC, which it was. Nothing super exciting until I consulted some lists of DC walks, and discovered Embassy Row wasn't far to the west. Also that it's mostly along Massachusetts Avenue, a major street, which is pretty funny coming from Boston/Cambridge. I did see many embassies, there seems to be a range from "we can afford to lease a building" to "we can afford to build our own culturally-redolent building with security gates", Turkey being the star there. Japan had a huge ground but the big building looks like a bunker.
Then I headed further west into the Georgetown neighborhood, said to have a lot of nice buildings. It does! Though also really narrow ones. Certainly looked like a pleasant neighborhood, though I imagine the rents are high. Supermarkets... actually looks like you'd be near either a Safeway or TJ, so not bad there.
Metro: nnng. Rail is rated by distance, 7 day passes exist but are pricy -- $38.50 for 7 days, which would just fail to pay for itself if you commuted 5 days at the maximum distance for that pass. And I was told that still doesn't get you onto the buses, which is another $17.50 for a pass. Probably better just to load money on a card.
Escalators seem broken a lot. Some stations are reeallly deep. Actual stairs are very rare, it's all escalator or elevator. Lights on the edge of the platform light up when a train approaches. Stations have next train timing displays which are nice. The Red Line trains inform you that they are "a 7000 series train" and also have a dynamic route display like some of the trains in NYC.
Monday: Smithsonian Zoo. Decent, decent size, and free. Cold and vet meant a bunch of animals were out of sight, but I got to see all seven Asian elephants, quite a lot of gorillas and orangs, and some decent small mammals, including the always-cute and always-mobile sand cats. There were a couple of beavers, one of which kept attacking a metal door; I don't know if it was trying to get in for food, to go inside, or get to a female -- a third beaver was found on the other side.
The zoo also had a T. Rex skull, with conservation information of "Extinct"; I sent a picture to a friend, who replied "Are you okay???", I guess worried that I was feeling extinct. I just thought the info was hilarious.
Tuesday: Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Pretty big. I think I managed to eyeball most of it in three hours, but that's with a hall being closed, and some pretty superficial eyeballing. I spent particular time in a mosasaur room, Mud Masons of Mali, African Peoples in general, and Human Origins. Mosasaurs are apparently overgrown monitor lizards, which I found kind of funny. Pterosaurs are archosaurs, like dinosaurs and crocodilians; plesiosaurs were apparently some whole other branch of reptiles, on the same level as archosaurs, turtles, and lizards.
Wednesday: mostly veg, with a bit of going out for restaurant food and shopping.
Thursday: long walk through Arlington, largely trying to find parks, even though nothing non-evergreen is green yet. I did find a couple parks that probably will be nice later, but my overall reaction to Arlington has been 'meh'.
Friday: long walk through DC proper. Got out at Metro Center, walked east along H street; very monumental even without actual monuments. (I.e. big buildings with little retail.) Chinatown has the standard gate and like a street or two of businesses, it's tiny. After consulting satellite views a bit, I jumped over to Dupont Circle as looking more residential/mixed than downtown DC, which it was. Nothing super exciting until I consulted some lists of DC walks, and discovered Embassy Row wasn't far to the west. Also that it's mostly along Massachusetts Avenue, a major street, which is pretty funny coming from Boston/Cambridge. I did see many embassies, there seems to be a range from "we can afford to lease a building" to "we can afford to build our own culturally-redolent building with security gates", Turkey being the star there. Japan had a huge ground but the big building looks like a bunker.
Then I headed further west into the Georgetown neighborhood, said to have a lot of nice buildings. It does! Though also really narrow ones. Certainly looked like a pleasant neighborhood, though I imagine the rents are high. Supermarkets... actually looks like you'd be near either a Safeway or TJ, so not bad there.
Metro: nnng. Rail is rated by distance, 7 day passes exist but are pricy -- $38.50 for 7 days, which would just fail to pay for itself if you commuted 5 days at the maximum distance for that pass. And I was told that still doesn't get you onto the buses, which is another $17.50 for a pass. Probably better just to load money on a card.
Escalators seem broken a lot. Some stations are reeallly deep. Actual stairs are very rare, it's all escalator or elevator. Lights on the edge of the platform light up when a train approaches. Stations have next train timing displays which are nice. The Red Line trains inform you that they are "a 7000 series train" and also have a dynamic route display like some of the trains in NYC.