Snow, snow everywhere!
Thats how Washington, District of Columbia seemed from air! As a warm-blooded temporarily-texan (Me!!) found out, snow's less fun if you are stuck inside all the time thanks to the sub-zero temperatures outside! Woe's me, Woe's meeeee! Luckily, my class buddy from SVCE ( http://www.svce.ac.in, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cse_svce ( an age-restriced group, btw ?! ) ) Shrivatsan "Steve" V. , was similarly stuck at his sis' place in Reston, just outside D.C. ( I was/am put up in South Riding, VA , around 10 miles from Dulles International Airport). So what do two bored-to-death 'chamathu pasanga' think up to do in their 'vetti' time? Read on...
Since I had to reach Steve's point-de-existence by 9am to leave for D.C., I got up at a positively ghastly 7:30am, and got dropped over at his place by 9am...All to see that Steve was just up brushing his teeth(the lazy dog), and we ended up leaving only around 11am from his place.. We bought a AAA map of DC downtown and metro routes ( pronounced as "r'auts")... His brother-in-law was kind enough to drop us off at West Falls Church/VT/UVa station to hop over to DC. The whole metrorail system, incidentally, reminded me of Singapore's fantastic metro system...(D.C.'s system was probably smaller in scale and speed...Singapore 1, D.C. 0!)
There we were, me and Steve, decided to spend the day walking through the "The Greatest Museums on Earth" (wtvr) i.e., the Smithsonian Buildings, in Washington D.C. The museum of American History was perhaps the most interesting one, with its description of the American Revolution, the musings on migration and so on. The Hope Diamond ( flicked from India, as is with most valuable diamonds( as steve remarked so eloquently, "t******** pasanga")) was another /*pardon the pun*/ bright spot, in the Museum of Natural History . But rest of it was mundane, almost boring, and I could not really figure out why the whole biz had this big hooplah around it... Well, we walked and walked ( poor little college students that we were, cars were still beyond our reach), all the way to the capitol, only to realize we can't get in, and then another couple of miles or so to the White House, zig-zagging pathetically and dragging our feet across most of downtown DC....Yeah, we saw the Monument en route, and as huge as it was, kept reminding me of Sushanth's comments on a age-old cse_svce group mail about sivalingams, (I hope he does read this, though I suspect he won't)...yet another 'copy' from ancient Egypt ( for those in the dark, the Washington Monument is a brick by brick copy of a similar oblisk in Eqypt).
One thing that was truly good to look at from a tourist's perspective was the presence of a huge christmas tree, right between the Monument and the WH....Also, there were all these colorful pines from each of the other 50 states, and one from Loiusiana with ornaments from evey other state , since the school asked to put ornaments on that tree had been obliterated by Katrina earlier this year...touching, indeed! Not something you know from watching TV !
We heard of these great Indian restaurants serving awesome food in Midtown D.C., such as Aroma, Beyond the Naan, Bombay Express and so on.. All usually close after 9pm wonly, as people told us...Alas! it was a Saturday...so wadduyuno....all of these 'exotic' places were closed by 5pm....(slightly dumb if you ask me, closing earlier on saturdays when people are free to roam about!)..we roamed about the grid-like parallel roads of midtown dc , for perhaps 3 hours, groping around sans direction for some eating place palatable to our vegetarian south-indian tastes... We finally wound up at a Subway, and ended up having a veggie delight as always...so much for our south-indian food hunt!
Finally, all we needed to do was to catch the return metrorail back to Virginia, and waddyuno some trains were to be shut down early that day, by 7pm, and we literally ran (rather stumbled along after beig literally maimed after walking for god knows how long) to Connecticut Ave. and Ith street ( D.C., is one of those places which has streets named by letter along north-south and numbered streets on east-west directions). Guess what we found? That station entrance was closed on saturdays! A board simply directed us to 18th and Ith to get to the next entrance...
Finally we found a fair-faced man who directed us to the right entrance, and we alighted aboard a train to Vienna, Va., after much deliberation on how to inform some folks to pick us up....
Home and dry, after about 15 hours of walking and travel and what not... One day down the drain, but hey, we can claim we saw the capital of the world ( or so they say!)!
Steve was sadly off to NC as his sis was shifting her house there, and I was back to being bored alone...Sober note to end this post, I know, but life's ups and downs are too common to note, let alone to be judged closely...
t.c.
