No posting for the past week or so while I've been in the
Dragon's Lair. Meanwhile, our exploits have been chronicled
here and
here (and probably more since then).
A few notes about those posts:
Tyler is a really nice guy. Kathleen and I met him just as we were getting married, which became the subject of an MR post. I am afraid we made nuisances of ourselves during this visit, managing to disrupt the entire building so badly that Robin came out to investigate the source of the commotion. Tyler was busy preparing for a trip and very graciously put up with the disruption.
Though
Bryan made an attempt at taking the geek crown, I think my photo in the Smithsonian deserves at least honorable mention. Kathleen says he looks too young to vote; I think that probably doesn't matter, given
his recent publication.
Robin's job in life appears to be to question everything. No, I mean everything. I think he's up to it, too. It's an honorable pursuit.
And despite his normally polemic posts,
Alex may be the quietest of the bunch. Too bad.
All of the stuff we really wanted to see at the
Smithsonian was in closed sections (Arts & Industry and American History), so we settled on the few American History artifacts temporarily displayed in the Air & Space Museum. We also went to the Native American museum. It's been a long time since I've been to the first, and the second was built since then. I was surprised to see:
- The actual piece of Woolworth's counter from the 1960 sit-in
- A stump from Spotsylvania. Wow.
- General Sherman's hat (looks like it went through hell)
- General Custer's coat (some odd stains on it)
If stuck in Washington and in need of vegetarian food, be sure to check out the Native American museum. The choices and quality were very good, though it was a little pricey. Peasant food is almost always vegetarian because it is hard to catch, cook, and store meat; this may be therefore a very historically accurate depiction (there were also fish, fowl, and buffalo menu choices).
The Museums of Industry and Arts and of American History are both closed. The SI staff indicated that there is no definitive plan to reopen them. They blamed it on a lack of funds; I'm not sure what to make of that given that
recent SI chief Lawrence Small was both a record fund raiser for the Institution and a record, er, spender.
The DC metro bus system is not bad, or were we just lucky that our hotel lay on the same route as the Library of Congress, our primary destination? The freeway system in Northern Virginia and DC is a complete mess. The light rail system in Baltimore is okay, but not great.
At one point, we were on a road headed into a cluster of indistinct concrete buildings. I was thinking, and then my wife said, that it looked like something out of
Brazil (the movie, not the place). Washington is freakish: you can walk from the high rent district to a neighborhood populated by people who probably do not have permanent addresses within a few minutes, yet all the while knowing that over $2 trillion is controlled nearby.
The Library of Congress is bizarre. We were both issued library cards. There were bold signs warning us that they were not souvenirs. No library employee ever wanted to look at them thereafter.
You cannot visit the stacks: you must find what you are looking for through the card catalog, then submit a request (in triplicate, with carbon paper), then wait for it to be delivered if it can be found. It may take a day. Several of the books my wife requested were not found even though they were not shown to be "charged" (you can't check them out). The librarians shrugged it off: they're probably either gone or misplaced. Gone? You have to go through security both entering and exiting; the security is tougher coming in then going out. Misplaced? This was blamed on the contract workers down in the bowels. Most people would generally accept the idea that the library staff who hired the contractors would have some oversight responsibility -- metrics, incentive alignment, and such -- but I think those quaint ideas exited in the Viet Nam era or earlier. I pointed out that a particularly old pamphlet was in bad shape and should probably be restored, or at least stored in a larger folder - yeah, the librarian said, but there's nothing that can be done. Don't they have a restoration department? What exactly is the point of the LoC if not to preserve these artifacts?
In Baltimore, I went to one and only one tourist attraction: The B&O Museum's
Allegheny, a 2-6-6-6 monster of a steam locomotive. Well, that and a bunch of other stuff at the B&O museum. And there's some other stuff in Baltimore, I suppose.
Labels: poverty, railroads, travel, vegetarian
