Spring break! Jonas and I are leaving cold, snowy Boston for a road trip down south. Not Miami, Fort Lauderdale or Cancun like all the others, but to Washington DC, Philadelphia and Atlantic City – and it’s gonna be great!
We took the bus from Boston to DC Sunday night, ten minutes to midnight. We figured that we could save a night but still have the entire day by taking a night bus. The drive was supposed to take 10 hours, but after half an hour we had to turn back to Boston to drop up a man, who didn’t fell safe in his wheelchair, so the drive took almost 11 hours. We arrived at union Station in DC around 10.30 after not many hours of sleep, but regardless we headed for the hostel to drop off our luggage and the went to see all the monuments and memorials.
DC is truly the city of memorials. We walked around the city for most of the day, getting to ten or more memorials, monuments and landmarks. Everything from the well-know like The White House, the Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson Memorial, to the more unknown memorials for Frank Roosevelt, Martin Luther King (who is BU alumni, by the way!) and the fallen in World War II. The weather was really perfect and felt almost summer-like for us, coming from Boston’s subzero degrees to DC’s 15 degrees Celsius.
The second day we went to the US Capitol on a rainy day. It was a really amazing experience – we took a tour around the building and went to both the House of Representatives and the Senate – the Senate was actually in session, when we went there, but it was only a few speeches, not much action. Everything from admission to the guided tours where free, which surprised me a little, but makes good sense, since the Congress should be available to everyone, regardless of income. I finally learned the American system of two champers (House and Senate), but I still don’t fully understand how the power is divided between the two, and how the President fits in to the picture. The system seems way too complex for the common man to understand.
The third (and last) day we went to a few museums, and then we wanted to go to the Arlington Cemetery, where many US Presidents rest and a lot of US soldiers. We took the subway to Pentagon – it was faster, and then we could see that as well – and tried walking to the cemetery from there. We got to a back entrance, but were told that it was restricted area, and we had to go around to the visitors’ entrance. We walked on coming to another entrance, which was also military only (most of the cemetery is military ground). Finally we gave up and ordered an Uber ride to take us to the right entrance, only to find out that the cemetery would close in a few minutes.
