October 24, 2010

Not too long after the proverbial 11am time slot we managed to stick our necks out of the apartment. Having learnt a few lessons yesterday we let the car rest.

Today’s goal was the National Mall area, which is a monument lovers equivalent to a pub walk. The national institutions and monuments are so heavily concentrated that our tourist map had left several important ones out, to make room for highlighting the others.

We jumped on the subway and blended with the native population. Most obscure reading material observed in real life and actively being read by one of the natives: “The organic dog biscuit cookbook.” I kid you not.

We jumped off the subway at Union Station and Wikipedia told us about the train accident here in 1953. A runaway train crashed into the station and broke through the floor with the locomotive ending up in a storage room. Incredibly they built a temporary floor over the locomotive and reopened the station 3 days later so guests could arrive for the inauguration of president Eisenhower.

On our way to Capitol we snapped up some ice cream and passed by the supreme court and the library of congress:

Viktor wanted to know what the supreme court was and this gave a great opportunity to talk about democracy and the principle of separation of powers into an executive, a legislature and a judiciary.

We proceeded to the Capitol and after refreshing a bit with Wikipedia we spoke about the US model for the legislature with two different entities and a presidential veto. The model was challenged with many “what if” questions and we had a hard time defending democracy.

There were squirrels all around.

Walking down from the Capitol we got our first view of the mall:

We made our way slowly towards the Washington monument passing a number of small museums and other lesser buildings (irony alert). In the central area there was a science and engineering expo with lots of interesting booths.

We saw superconducting materials, cooled down by liquid nitrogen, levitate on top of a railway of very strong magnets. I tried to take a picture of one, but they were too fast. Here is the railway a split second after the superconductor has passed. 🙂 Liquid nitrogen in the tubes in the background.

And here you can see production of a nanowire made from a polymer material using an electrode and 20000 volts:

Unfortunately the wire was so thin we couldn’t see it. The wires accumulate and form a microfiber tissue that has some cool characteristics. We saw demonstrated that it lets water vapor pass, but not water.

We had lunch on the lawn in the middle of the mall. We were short of food and I grabbed a burger at a food stand. Hélène wanted this documented to show the world that I eat junk food regularly:

Speaking about junk food, I’m starting to get a feel for what it must be like to get food when you live in the US these days. It is not pretty.

I spoke previously of my challenge with the big portions at restaurants here. That turns out to be only part of the picture for the nutritiously challenged in this country. It is extremely difficult to avoid sugar and fat unless you pay a lot of attention. We have bought our stuff in what seems like good quality supermarkets, but have been fooled time and time again.

We bought some chocolate chip cookies as a snack. They had 33% sugar in them! We got some innocent looking yoghurt: 17% sugar! We bought bread marked “All natural whole grain, 100% whole wheat” and For ultimate health”. The third ingredient is sugar. The bread contains 9% sugar! Can you believe that? We got some bagels that looked good. They were dripping with butter on the inside. The salami we bought had way more fat than we find at home. I now realize that the relatively large numbers of slim and fit people I see here must be working really hard to eat right.

Oops, sorry, carried away again.

On our way we passed by a guy who was juggling using a basketball, a tennis racket and a bowling ball. Very impressive:

When we reached the Washington Memorial the sun was in a very favorable position and I used a long time until I was moderately satisfied with this picture:

I did use a long time, something Hélène made me aware of without saying a single word. 🙂

We passed by the Treasury

on our way to the White House:

 

We were starting to get saturated on monuments and great buildings.

Last night I had managed to gather some energy to do research on the zoo just before going to bed. The event they had closed for turned out to be something called “Boo at the Zoo,” an annual Halloween party. And, they would hold another one today! I got us tickets online and our plan was to get some face paint during the day and use that to blend in with all the cool US kids in nice costumes. Despite heay use of the GPS app during the day we were never close to a toy store. It was getting late now and we switched to face paint search mode. We walked around for about an hour and searched multiple stores, often helped by someone who directed us to the next store were they surely had some. In the end we gave up and took an overpacked subway back.

In the street, just next to our apartment, we found our savior of the day in the form of a seller of chinese blinking plastic things.

We grabbed a few sandwiches for dinner again and hurried to the zoo. Iseline became a great bunny with her newly acquired ears, clothing of the right color and a bit of Hélène’s lipstick:

The boys were also pretty happy with their hats and blinking teeth (which you cannot see because of the flash). Note Viktor’s lipstick red nose. He scared everyone with his deep voice and the phrase “I am the dead clown!”

The zoo party was great and a good warmup for Halloween. There were many really cool decorations and lots of “treat stations.”





There were cemeteries with tombstones for extinct species, complete with death year:

After a couple of hours in the zoo the kids had half the candy in their bags and half in their stomachs. Viktor was happy with his catch

and Iselline was sleepy and ready to go to bed

NOT

All in all a good day and a nice contrast to yesterday.

Once again everyone is sleeping around me while I finish off the blogging. Good to be current again.

See you around, folks!

Eirik

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