G&I decided to go on a tour to the nation’s capital: Washington, DC
We left Chinatown on Saturday morning and our first stop was Philadelphia, PA. There, we went to visit Independence Hall, Old Capitol Building and Liberty Bell. It was really cold and though there was some sun… it wasn’t warm at all.
We arrived in the afternoon at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, MD. It is one of America's oldest seaports since 1600's, and one of the world's newest travel destinations. We didn’t see many people there, but it was really cold. All weekend was extremely cold!
Then we proceed on to Washington D.C. We were supposed to explore some of the various buildings that comprise the Smithsonian Institute, such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National History Museum, but we only did the NASM. It was pretty cool and I got to see very interesting stuff.
After the NASM we went to take pictures in front of the Capitol and from there you could see the Washington Memorial, so we also took some pictures there. Thomas Jefferson Memorial was our last stop on Saturday. There were few people there so it was a good time to get good shots. Out of the 500 pictures I took in DC, only 50 or 60 came out good. As we all know, people don’t know how to take pictures! Me included! At one point all the view overwhelmed me. After watching Forrest Gump so many times, and seeing the WM and that pool… it was too much for me. It was one of my dreams come true.
On Sunday we got up really early, again, and we headed to Lincoln Memorial, Korean War Memorial & Vietnam Memorial. The 3 of them are in the same area, so we first went to KWM, then to LM and later to VM. I learnt pretty interesting stuff about Lincoln and all the different wars. The tour guide was Chinese and out of the 50 people in our tour G&I and the Romanian ladies, the rest was Chinese. So it was pretty funny listening to him speak in Chinese first and then English.
The VM is the one with all the names written in the walls. I looked for SIMI but I didn’t find any :( - but that’s ok. I don’t think there are many Simis in this world anyway.
We headed to the White House and according to our tour guide we were lucky GWB didn’t go to church this weekend. If he had decided to go to church, they would have closed all the area. So we were lucky to get our pictures taken in front of the WH. I thought it was bigger, to tell you the truth.
Our tour was over by this time. There were no more places to go… BUT, we were gonna go eat Chinese food (again). G&I didn’t eat Chinese and we ate something else. By this time we were really tired of all Chinese (no offense to whoever read this and is Chinese) and we needed something more ‘latino’ – we ate fajitas. Lol.
On our way to the Chinese restaurant where the other people would eat, I saw the Unknown Soldier Tomb and I told G to go there so that we could take a picture. So after we ate, we went there and we took pictures there too.
I wanted to go to see the Arlington Cemetery, but that wasn’t included in our tour, and I don’t know if you can go and take pictures there or not.
Washington DC was a GREAT experience for me. I loved it and I’m gonna go again – not in winter time. It was really cold and as I’m still sick (I haven’t recovered my voice yet) I didn’t get to enjoy it that much. I loved the Natural History Museum (we went there on Sunday morning) and I’ll get some pictures of the orchids in other post.