Washington D.C. final days (Saturday and Sunday)

Saturday I went to the National Postal Museum by myself. It was really neat and probably the nerdyist museum I have been to. They had an exhibit about stamps, about V-mail during WWII and then another exhibit about depression era stuff that wasn't open yet.





After I hoped on the subway and went back to the National Building Museum. I wanted to go back to the gift shop because I was so overwhelmed the day before and I couldn't decide what to buy. I also checked out the Norwegian rest stops exhibit again. Then I walked back to the hotel which was about 23 blocks away. It was a nice walk though. I went into an H&M store for the first time. I had previously bought their clothes at thrift stores and always really liked them. The store was packed and it was set up in a similar way to Forever 21 where they have things organized by color or theme instead of by type of garment. For some reason this really bothers me. What always ends up happening is that I see something I really like but it's out of place and it's not the right size and I have no idea where to look for the other sizes. I just want to go to a store and see all the pants together and shirts together. I guess I am clothes separatist, I'm anti clothes integration.

I also walked down the mall a little bit and walked by the White House, which was much closer to our hotel and it was also ridiculously crowed there. I didn't stay long because I was uncomfortable being packed in with so many tourists.

When I got back to the hotel I just relaxed for awhile because that night we went to the opera and I wanted to rest. We had thought that the Kennedy Center was in one direction from our hotel and we walked to this building that turned out to be the State Department building and most certainly not the Kennedy Center. Then we were majorly confused asked this man walking around and he turned out to be an opera fan and especially Wagner so he Natan started talking while he walked us to the Kennedy Center. It was super friendly of him and we got there just in time. The opera we saw was Siegfried, which is part of Wagner's ring cycle. I really enjoyed the show, the production was American themed so it was interesting. For example, the first scene takes place in the woods were it is secluded from other people and Siegfried lives there with Mime. In this production that put the scene in a trailer park, it worked really well. The other scenes were less successful but not bad.
Natan asked some random woman to take a picture of us and she like scoffed and rolled her eyes! She could have just said no. So he asked someone else who gladly took the picture for us.

The lightening makes Natan's jacket look really red, which is was not and it makes him look like a game show host.

Here you can see the weird statue of Kennedy that makes him look like a burn victim.


Before the show we went to this really delicious restaurant for dinner and afterward we went back there for dessert which was equally delicious. I had a vertical banana split.



Sine we were staying by George Washington University there were statues of him everywhere.


Waiting for the bus, which turned out to be unnessacary

Washington day two (Friday)

Friday Natan and I took the subway back to where we were on Thursday, by the capitol and went to the Florida House. The Florida House serves as an embassy for Florida citizens visiting in Washington D.C.



The door of the Florida House


Then we went to the Folger Shakespeare Library. They had an exhibit about sleeping and dreaming in Elizabethan times. This is the drinking fountain there.


Then we walked to the National Building Museum, which was just wonderful. We saw exhibits about the planing of D.C., one that showed various items from the collection at the museum, one about rest stops in Norway and one about planing green cities. That one was my least favorite and the rest stops of Norway was my favorite. But even better was the gift shop. It was awesome. It was more like a small store with lots of books and design items than just selling items from the museum. I got a crank flashlight shaped like a black cat, the eyes are the lights, I got this wall vase for my mom, a pacman oven mitt for my sister and a porcelain key necklace for myself.
The National Building Museum, it is housed in the pension building from the Civil War.

A statue outside the museum.


The Museum has the largest Corinthian columns in the world!



I had to sneak this picture that was in the exhibit about planing D.C. because pictures are not allowed there, unfortunately.

Washington D.C. day one (Thursday)

This is our hotel is D.C. It was called the Allen Lee. I thought it was a hostel because I found it on a hostel website and they have rooms with shared bathrooms like most hostels. But it was a regular hotel and even though I had reserved a room with a shared bathroom, when we got there they gave us a larger room with a private bathroom and TWO double beds for the same price as the other room. They said if someone reserved the room we would have to move but no one did and we stayed there the whole time. Natan even tried to pay the difference in price just to guarantee that we would keep the room but they told us not to worry.



It was in a really great location. We were right across from George Washington University, about seven blocks from the White House, a couple of blocks from the Kennedy Center (that's where we saw the opera on Saturday so that was nice) and in walking distance of Georgetown (we walked there for dinner our first night)

So Thursday was our first full day in Washington and first we went to the Holocaust Museum. The museum is free but you need to get tickets that they give out in the morning. The museum was good, but the security guards were pretty jerky. The cafe was good too. I had a bagel and matzah ball soup! They had a temporary exhibit on propaganda and that was really great. After spending more hours than we had planned in the Holocaust Museum we wandered around looking for something to eat but there are surprisingly few restaurants around the Mall so we went to the Smithsonian castle and had chili cheese dogs!


Then we walked to Capitol Hill and as we were getting closer we heard steel drum music. We saw that there were people on the lawn of the capitol and they had a small stage set up and we saw people rehearsing something. We stayed and watched for awhile because it was so ridiculous and after ward we found out that it was the National Day of Prayer. It had very low attendance, apparently during Bush's presidency it had become a large event that held events in the White House. Obama though has distanced himself from the day because of ties between church and state and the constitutional division of them.


We headed to the Library of Congress next. I was really looking forward to going there because I am a big fan of the LOC and their website. We saw two of their exhibits, one was about early America and it featured the Waldseemmuller 1507 world map, which is the first to show America named America. The other exhibit was about Lincoln because it's the bicentennial of his birthday. I could have stayed much longer there but they were closing.

Chesapeake Bay

Our first day in Washington we decided to travel out of the city while we still had the car. So we drove to Virginia and went to Mason Neck State Park which is on the Chesapeake Bay. It was beautiful and it was nice to be outside with fresh air and in the sun.


This is the Beaver swamp but we did not see any beavers.







Afterward we went to Manassas, which was were the first battle of the Civil War took place.



This is a statue of good ole Stonewall Jackson. Manassas is where he got his nickname.


This memorial was put up after the battle by veterans.

Philadelphia

We got to Philadelphia on Sunday night. We stayed in a hostel with four beds and we were told that if another couple came they would put them with us, but we ended up having the room to ourselves both days.
We had a shared bathroom, and the other guests were mostly this group of middle school students on a field trip. The hostel was this great old mansion in the middle of Fairway Park.


We had planned to go to the art museum on Monday but we forgot that most museums are closed Mondays. Then we were going to go to Gettysburg but their was 100% chance of rain and it had rained for a couple days before that and there were flood warnings so we didn't go at all. So Monday we ended up going to the Mutter Museum, which "was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies"! And there were a hell of a lot of anomalies! When I saw the Bodies exhibit a couple of years ago it was really impressive but somehow those bodies seemed like fun and playful and the poses were like playing sports or something, but these bodies were more scientific. There were fetus' in jars and all these weird things and medical instruments lying about. They also had a lot of stuff about conjoined twins and they had the growth that was removed from Grover Cleavland's jaw and a piece of John Wilkes Booth! It was really impressive and crazy. You should check out the virtual tour: http://www.collphyphil.org/virt_tour/museum_5.htm
You weren't allowed to take pictures in there but the virtual tour is pretty good.
After that we just drove around because it was raining. We went to some thrift stores and then we met up with one of Natan's friends at the bar he works at which was a really great place called Johnny Brendas. It's a stupid name but the food was good and they had only local beers and good songs on the jukebox.

So these are pictures of a restaurant that we ate in called The Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia. They had a trolley car inside! And an old timey phone transfer system. It was cool, I've never seen one up close and all the cords still worked and you could plug them in and they still had the labels for the different lines.



Tuesday we went to the Philadelphia art museum.

Natan really wanted to see the Marcel Duchamp stuff they had, which is basically all of his work. It was awesome! Two of his largest most impressive works are the large glass, which actually broke while in transport while Duchamp was still alive and the Museum was of course freaking out but he thought it was great and pieced all the glass back together.

and one called Given 1. The Waterfall 2. Illuminating Gas, which is a door that you walk up to a door

and look through two peep holes and see a woman lying in a field by a stream.

It was so fantastic, when it was first exhibited you people didn't know what it was and there was a foot pedal that you stepped on and a light came on behind the door and illuminated the scene. Now they keep it always lit up and the foot pedal is gone, but I like to think of people might accidentally step on the pedal.
These pictures are all from the Philadelphia Museum website.
Here is a statue of George Washington outside the Museum.

Philadelphia was pretty good, it was raining pretty much the whole time we were there and we didn't go see any of the historical American sites so I would definitely go back there. Also we also only went to one gallery on one floor of the art Museum and that was amazing so I would want to go back.

Drive

Sunday we left Toronto and drove to Philadelphia. It was a really nice drive and the weather was beautiful, I actually got to wear shorts for a brief time which was awesome. We drove straight through New York and stopped for breakfast at this restaurant that was delicious!



We saw a lot of farms that had wind power on them. It was nice to see.




On the way we stopped to get maps out of the trunk and we noticed a small graveyard across the street. It was a family graveyard so there were only a couple of graves there.

Visual Toronto III (Houses, etc.)

This was the hostel that we stayed at.



This awesome building was a high school.

And this building was right across the street. What a crazy city.

This was outside of a used game store.


This house was down the street from our hostel

At first I thought they were restoring it, then I thought they were tearing it down, but it turns out they are moving it to a new location so they can build a condo on the land.

I think the condo will be really ugly there but I'm happy they are keeping the house because it was pretty awesome.