Washington DC

What a city!!! We spent 3 whole days in DC and still did not finish seeing all that can be seen there. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza in Silver Spring, Maryland just outside DC. Terry found a great deal for this very fancy hotel. The parking lot scared us a little bit but the lobby was pretty nice and the room itself turned out to be outstanding. We stayed at the 14th floor at one of the end rooms. It had a king size bed, couch, work table, internet and so on. It was pretty good. We found a nice Indian restaurant, Bombay Gaylord Restaurant, where we ordered some good Indian food that we took with us back to the room.

We made a quick plan for the next day and went to bed. Monday, we took the shuttle to the train station and took the metro into the city. The DC metro is very cool and for $6.95, we could use the train all day. First stop was a walking tour of the White House. We used the AAA book to schedule such a visit. We walked through a street and promptly got lost and ended up in front of a nice looking building which we quickly found was the treasury building. Right next to it was a white building which we were not sure about. It turned out to be the White House. It was quite a surprise that it turned out to be smaller than we expected. It is quite beautiful though. Check out our White House photos here.

Next stop was the Old Executive Building. This was the site of a fire recently. You can read about this here. The Architecture in this city is very cool. We walked around the block and got to the back of the White House. Here was where the National Christmas tree. It was kinda small but it has its significance I guess. We saw a nice pointy thingie further down the road. We headed towards that and it turned out to be the Washington Monument. We got ourselves free tickets and went to the entrance. We took the 70 second elevator ride up the building. We could get an awesome view of DC from there. The US capitol on one side, the White house on another, the Lincoln memorial at yet another side. It was cool. We also learned a lot about General George Washington. One of the lessons we learned was that George Washington is a cool guy. We took the elevator ride down which was quite the experience. The elevator stopped a couple of times to show us stones and inscriptions from different countries that was embedded on the walls.

After coming down, we decided to walk to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This is where they print dollar bills. We took a tour and it was kinda cool to see people handling 1000s of dollars as if they were newspaper. The Holocaust Museum was next but we got some good news from the office of our congresswoman. They arranged for us to visit the US capitol next day for a tour. More about this later. The Holocaust museum was so touching.....How people can be so evil is incomprehensible. It was truly a tragedy and millions of people suffered because of the atrocity of a few... Such a thing should never recur but we will be guilty of similar complicity because such things keep happening today.

We were tired after this and were ready to head back home. We did pick up food from the same Indian restaurant and headed back the hotel. It was a very satisfying day and we both were looking for the next couple of days in DC. More about that in the next post.

Meanwhile, a quick note about Benazir Bhutto. Whether she was a good person or not is irrelevant. What happened was a tragedy which can never be explained away. When will people stop killing each other.....