Well hello party people!
How is life in the UK? Washington is...warm, very warm. Fun fact of the day- Washington DC was built on a swamp. A very humid, very muggy swamp. Me and Yasmin have been sweating our way round this fine city like nobody's business but we are embracing it, because let's face it our pale British bodies haven't experienced this much sun since the 90's! Luckily our hostel is only a short walk from the main part of the city, and everything you would want to see is within walking distance of each other...except from the zoo, but we'll get to that later.
SO, after a surprisingly comfortable first night in the hostel we went off exploring on Wednesday morning, after stopping for a hearty breakfast first of course...
Now I don't think you've all realised how excited I've been about the fact that all of the museums here are free. ALL of them. FREE. It's amazing. I promised Yasmin we would intersperse them with other non-museumy activities so she didn't actually kill me in my sleep, and to her credit she's been incredibly patient whilst I've run around them all like a fat kid in a sweet shop. Our first port of call was the National Gallery, which was incredible. It is an absolutely huge building with some really beautiful exhibits. I'll put some pictures below of some of my favourite aspects of the gallery, with my favourite exhibit probably being 'When Art Danced with Music'. It was a full on multimedia experience of the history of the relationship between music and ballet and was really beautiful.
After that we headed off to meet my lovely friend, and fellow American history geek, Jack who has moved out here to do a Masters in American Policy, (or something like that, he did try to explain, it has something to do with Congress?!). We headed off to say hello to a certain Mr Lincoln before stopping in a little cafe and having a good old catch up. It was so good to see him, and he seemed to appreciate it when I told him I had forgotten how Scouse he was. Simple pleasures.
After we said our goodbyes Yasmin very graciously let me drag her round one more museum; The Museum of American History, which I have to say was the one I was most excited about. Even if you only have a vague interest in American history this place will have something for you. From exhibitions about the Presidents and First Ladies, to America at War and American culture it really was very interesting. Promise!
As per my promise, Thursday was a strictly non-museum day. After adopting a rather lovely Welsh boy from our dorm, whose friend had let him down a day before they were supposed to come to DC, we decided to hop on the metro and head slightly out of the city to the National Zoo. Which, if you were interested is also FREE. Washington DC have got this tourism thing down. Despite the fact our combined age exceeded 60 as soon as we set foot in the zoo we became almost as childlike as those there on school trips. Especially when we were confronted by these guys....
It was just a great day, that ended with beaut noodles and even better frozen yoghurt. That my friends is what you call a win. We also got to witness the sassiest of girl fights on our way back to the hostel, so that was fun. We later lamented not filming it and putting it on Youtube so we could become an overnight sensation, but being the sensible white girls we are, we merely peered round the corner for a few minutes before getting the hell out of there.
Which brings us to today. Still ridiculously warm we headed out to go see ol' Barrack. Rather rudely he wasn't in, but I'm sure he'll be sad that he missed us.
Then something strange happened. On the hunt for lunch we nipped into a restaurant that we've walked past every day on our wanderings into the city and asked to see the menu. After the brief, and by now classic, exchange of 'Oh hey, are you from England? Do you live in London?', Yasmin decided to try her luck and see if our accents would get us a free lunch. Amazingly, and we're still not entirely sure how, they did! Yasmin got the ribs, I got the rare seared tuna, we both got passion fruit mojitos, and neither of us got a bill. It was, by all accounts, ridiculous and amazing all at once. We do now have a creepy Iranian guy semi-stalking us but that's ok right? I mean passion fruit mojitos! They're definitely worth it?
With a free lunch and mojito euphoria spurring us on we then headed down to the Natural History museum for some more of that good old fashioned learning. Not quite as good as the American History one, it was still bags of fun.
We are now back at the hostel chilling out and deciding what we want to do on our last day in DC tomorrow, before flying down to Florida on Sunday. I think, excitingly, bikes may be on the cards. So look forward to that one people.
Ciao for now. xxxxx
P.S. I have received an e-mail from my Gran who appears to be reading this blog. She is worried about my alcohol intake so I would like this public opportunity to formally apologise and reassure her that I am being as safe as possible! Love you Gran!
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