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.