The Natural History museum and a bit more Washington

Today we visited the Natural History Museum, with its foyer dominated by an elephant. Like its counterpart in New York, the way the exhibits are displayed is wonderful, showing creatures’ skeletons in the setting where they once lived before the climate changed. There was a minerology section and we saw the famous Hope diamond

Later we used Washington’s excellent train system to go to Crystal City, a shopping mall on the other side of town near the Pentagon. The trains are great – clean and fast. I was surprised at the lack of patronage but at least we had our choice of seats ????

We wanted to experience a bit more of ordinary life in the city. For a start, we tried a Starbucks coffee. Sorry, Americans, both of us pronounced it horrible. We tried getting into Costco but the door guards wouldn’t let us even go in for a sticky-beak without a member’s card. So we went to Walmart instead. The store sold everything at often a fraction of the price we pay in Oz. But we didn’t see anybody who would have qualified as one of the Walmart people whose images are shared on the internet.

Then we strolled around the many levels of the mall filled with too many fashion shops (just like at home), bought lunch at a food court, and ended up in an electronics store, where Pete, who wouldn’t touch a Kindle with a barge pole, admired the Sony equivalent. The price was much less than we would have paid in Australia, so he bought one. That caused all sorts of problems back home when we tried to buy books for it. The system recognised the serial number as bought in America, but the American site wouldn’t let us buy books because we were in Australia. Sigh. This was 2011, remember. Since then, Sony and a number of other sites no longer sell books or dedicated readers and everybody (including Pete) uses a tablet to read.

There were a lot of uniforms in the mall – understandable with the Pentagon close by. There’s a diner there, too, the classic American model of the 1950’s. No waitresses on rollerblades, though.

We caught the train back to the area around the Capitol building. It’s certainly an impressive pile of stone, kind of Roman in design. I expect that was deliberate. Then we headed into greener areas and admired a number of statues commemorating the Civil War, including General and later US President, Ulysses S. Grant. At the time work was underway preparing for an event which I suspect had to do with the Vietnam War. We noticed a couple of vets looking around.

Our last stop was at a stall near the museums that sold Tee shirts. I’d bought a Tee shirt in every country we visited and I acquired one with a bald eagle on the front. By that time the feet were starting to complain loudly. Looking back, we were eight years younger and a lot, lot fitter then.

Here are a couple of pictures of locals.

Tomorrow we would be heading for San Francisco, our last stop before the long flight home.