deird1: Twilight Sparkle's hot air balloon (MLP:FiM hot air balloon)
deird1 ([personal profile] deird1) wrote2024-04-03 07:39 am
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Aussie in DC

Just finished three days in DC! It is a great capital city, but not so much a great city. In that: all the touristy stuff is awesome, and all easy to get to – but the city feels like a bunch of buildings surrounding some tourist attractions. If you weren't interested in the tourist attractions, it wouldn't be much fun to live in, I don't think.

Random collection of thoughts:
- Their train system is excellent.
- The Lincoln Memorial is HUGE. And made me tear up.
- It somehow never occurred to me that people would use the National Mall as an actual park! We got there on a day when half the town was at the Mall flying kites.
- Rock Creek Park is lovely. If I lived there, I would walk along it at least once a week.
- The Cathedral is gorgeous. Matthew Shepard's tomb made me rather teary, as did their collection of paintings showing Mary and Jesus as caged refugees and Mister Rogers as a saint.
- I actually like the numbered/lettered street names better than I thought I would! Really helpful for keeping track of where you are. Even more convenient once I realised that all the state-named avenues were diagonal.
- I kept walking past supermarkets, wondering where the supermarkets were. Because the outside of them didn't trigger my "hey, that's a supermarket" at all. Also, foreign supermarkets always sell wine, which weirds my Aussie self out.

Now we're left for NYC. Far rainier than we'd like, but we'll still have fun.