Washington DC Photos, Part 1

The conference hotel where I was staying is located at 15th and M streets, right near the Mall, but I didn't have any time for sightseeing while the conference was underway. On the last evening of the conference, Robert & I went to dinner with the two professors from my school (at a really good southern-style restaurant) and then he and I went to check out the sights.

After walking about half a mile, we ran into a large white house. What? Oh yeah.


The photo is off-center because I was not interested in capturing the camera crew who were filming close shots of the flowers around the fountain. Unfortunately, Obama was not outside playing with his dog on the lawn.

The Treasury Building is old-looking in a stereotypical way. The statue is a random important dude that nobody but Robert has ever even heard of. (OK, it's Albert Gallatin, 4th Secretary of the Treasury, who served from 1801-1814, the longest tenure for any Treasury Secretary.)


I think this was a Civil War statue, but I'm not sure. A dude on a horse with various allegorical images around the base (see the bare-breasted chick on the left?).


The Washington Memorial looked pretty cool from a nice vantage point at the end of the reflecting pool, which did, incidentally, reflect the image of the memorial quite well. I had heard of the "reflecting pool" before but hadn't given any thought to what that was supposed to mean. Duh. See how the memorial is made from two different colors of stone? That's even more obvious up close, I think.


The reflecting pool had ducks and geese, and bats and swallows swooped overhead. A woman stepped into an almost knee-deep hole in the muddy ground next to the pool but surprisingly, did not seem to injure herself (though the $300 insoles for her shoes were ruined).

Apparently we were in town on the same day they did a rededication of the Lincoln Memorial, and he was looking pretty spiffy. The text above his head reads:

In this temple
As in the hearts of the people
For whom he saved the union
The memory of Abraham Lincoln
Is enshrined forever.


At the start of the path toward the Vietnam Memorial there was a statue that Robert called the memorial's photo op because the wall itself is not very photogenic from a distance.


I admit that I hadn't expected to have much reaction to the wall itself, but was hugely taken aback by its power. (I do not know how this works during the day, but seeing it at night was very moving.) The wall itself is the same height above ground for the entirety of its length, but the path/ground dips down in a shallow, elongated U so that when you start looking at it, you see only a small number of names, but as you walk along, the wall of names grows larger and larger. It's a very different kind of memorial as it really hits you when you look at it intimately rather than from a distance. I started crying about 20% of the way down the path.

There were several people there looking for specific names and photographing them and/or leaving flowers. There were a lot of names. Outside the wall area are a series of huge books that list alphabetically every person who died with the location on the wall so people can find them. There were a lot of books. I do not personally know anyone who died in the Vietnam War, but seeing the wall made me think about how easily my uncle J. could have died. (Surviving that war was bad enough.)

Walking back to the hotel, we passed this lion statue outside some building, perhaps a museum.


We also passed the headquarters of the Defenders of Wildlife group. Inside their place is a nifty four-pane stained glass window. (I am a sucker for stained glass.) I could only get a good shot of the middle two panes, though.


And so ended our evening in Washington, D.C.