The One with Fall Break

Fall break at App is basically where you get Thursday and Friday off, plus the weekend, so many people go on vacation somewhere nice. For us internationals, that meant a trip to Washington DC :) We were supposed to leave at 6.30 am on the Thursday morning, but thankfully it got pushed back to 7.30. We all met at the LLC, and piled into two 12-seater vans. 22 internationals plus 2 drivers = lots of very squashed people. The journey there took less than seven hours, and we only made one stop at a gas station in Virginia. We had some food and then continued our journey to Washington. It was raining heavily as we arrived, and we drove down Constitution Avenue, past all the monuments and the White House. It was wet but still very exciting to be in a new city. You could literally smell the history :)

We checked into our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott in the lower East corner of Washington. We checked in, then because we weren't starting our night time tour of the monument until seven, we decided to walk to find somewhere to eat. We realised that our hotel was basically in a place which was in the middle of building sites and office complexes, so it took us a couple of miles to reach restaurants. We finally found Pennsylvania avenue, a street which goes diagonally across the centre of DC. We had a nice dinner, then walked back to the hotel to meet up with the other internationals. We took the Metro, because Navy Yard metro station was about a minute's walk from the hotel.

We got off at L'Enfant Plaza, which is a station where you can transfer to any of the four lines (orange, blue, yellow and green, of which Navy Yard is on the green). We transferred to another station which is closer to the monuments, then got off and took a tour of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Memorial, World War II memorial, and the Vietnam War Memorial. They were very atmospheric in the dark and rain, and surprisingly busy with tourists. We did a lot of walking that night, and when we got back at about 11 we just collapsed into bed. I was sharing a room with Becca, Marcella and Evelien. Marcella and Evelien were in one bed and Becca and I in the other. They were extremely comfortable, unlike the Super 8 motel we stayed in in Raleigh...

As there were four girls to shower, Marcella woke up at 6.30 for hers, then we all took turns. We were all ready by 8, and headed over to the nearby Starbucks for a coffee. We met back at the hotel at 9, and headed out on the Metro to the Museum of Natural History. I think the only place I have seen more marble is Rome. All the museums are white, and most of them are marble. One of the great things about Washington is that because most of the museums are owned by the Smithsonian Institution, they are all freeeeeeee!!!!! The history museum was really good, but kind of similar to the one in London. We spent about an hour in there, then moved on to the National Archives. There we saw the original Declaration of Independenace and the Constitution of the US, along with the Bill of Rights. It was so exciting to think that I was looking at the ACTUAL paper that their quills had touched all those years ago. The signatures were the most interesting parts, I enjoyed reading them all.

From here, we went to the Museum of the American Indian. We didn't get to spend much time in here which was sad, but we did have lunch which was AMAZING. The cafeteria was set out in different sections, from "The Great Plains" to "South America and everything inbetween. I had a lovely chipotle chicken taco. We then walked up Capitol Hill (where the Capitol building which houses Congress is situated). At the top, behind the Capitol building is the Library of Congress. We spent a lot of time in here, because it had a very nice atmosphere and was fascinating. The original library was burnt down and they lost almost all the books, so Thomas Jefferson offered to sell them his personal collection for around $24,000. They accepted, but then this collection also got burnt down some years later. They are currently rebuilding the collection, buying around 600 books every year. Jefferson's library had an amazing collection of books, and instead of organising them alphabetically or by subject, he separated them into four sections, Memory, Reason and Imagination (or History, Philosophy and Fine Art).

After leaving the Library of Congress, we headed on the Metro over the river to Pentagon City Mall for a spot of retail therapy. Boone doesn't have a lot of shops, so the girls went crazy. We spent a few hours shopping, then returned to the hotel to drop off our shopping before heading out to meet some of the guys at the Hard Rock Cafe in Chinatown. We had drinks (non-alcoholic for the under-21s) and chatted until about 1. We were all really tired, so we got the Metro back to the hotel.

The next morning, some of the group headed off to Arlington cemetery. We decided to skip this, heading instead to H&M (we don't have one anywhere close to Boone) and then on to the National Gallery of Art. I could possibly have spent all day in here, but we did spent the entire morning wandering around. We ate lunch there too, and just enjoyed the art and the fantastic architecture of the two buildings (the West building housed the classical art from Da Vinci to Monet, whilst the East building housed the modern art from Picasso to Lichtenstein). After lunch we headed for the zoo. It was still pouring down with rain, so we just saw the cheetahs, the emus and the pandas (which were the most important as I had never seen a Giant Panda before) which were closest to the entrance. We stopped at Starbucks for about the tenth time on our trip (Starbucks is also another thing Boone doesn't have). We then went back to the hotel to change because we were going back to China town for dinner and to meet James (James didn't come on the trip with us but he got a lift from Christer, another App student we know who lives in Washington).

We were yet again exhausted after arriving back to the hotel at around 2am (it took longer because a hilarious incident occurred involving Becca sending James on the wrong train home, and us trying to contact him to tell him to switch trains). The next morning, we were due to leave at 12 and whilst everyone else had a lie-in, we decided not to waste our time in Washington. We left the hotel at nine to head for the Washington Memorial. We wanted to go up on the elevator to the top, but by the time we got there tickets had already sold out until the 12.30 trip, which would have been too late for us. We got back on the Metro and headed for the Museum of Crime and Justice and the International Spy Museum, both of which were $20 dollars to get into, and since we didn't have that much time we just had another Starbucks and headed back to the hotel.

We all piled back into the vans, and the journey took a little under an hour longer than the journey there, but we were all so tired that we slept for most of it anyway. We made a couple of stops, and arrived back at App at around 8pm on Sunday night, exhausted but happy after a fun weekend, despite all the rain :)