I’m back, by the way. I’m catching up. There’s a lot of reading and scrolling to do. (That was only four days? Really? Two of which were mostly travel? Really? It feels like…I was going to say a week but actually it’s more like some unknown unit of time that’s open-ended, it’s just Way More Than The Literal Hour By Hour Time. Could be a year. Big. A big unit. A big non-specific unit.) (Wait, that sounds…oh never mind.)
I even managed to fit some high-speed touristing in there. Would you believe it? What I mean by “touristing” here is just walking as far as I can to look at the outside of as much as I can. Museums and the like have to be done with enough time or there’s no point…although now I’ve said that I remember that I did go to the Natural History Museum on last year’s high speed touristing adventure…but more just to go inside and get a quick look than to do a proper museum visit. I went to Georgetown and the canal and along the river a bit, then up between the Watergate (god damn that’s an ugly “complex”) and the Kennedy Center (which like so many buildings in DC looks as if it had been built for a species three times the size of our own) and past GWU on Friday morning. Saturday lunch break I went to the Capitol – past the National Archive which is emphatically one of those buildings designed for a much larger species of human, and the whaddyacallit, the Commerce department building, with the giant Stalinist guy fighting with a giant Stalinist horse outside it. Dang, DC is weird-looking in places. To the Capitol, I say, or rather to the edge of where the grounds begin and then up One Street, past the DC appeals court, which I found oddly exciting, and past the Museum of Buildings which is itself a glorious and weird building. I consider that a pretty heroic feat of touristing with only an hour to do it in.
Then later on Saturday with even less than an hour I went just up to Thomas Circle and along two sides of Franklin Square.
In a way I wanted to stay in the hotel and do more high-speed talking instead, but…balance, people, balance. I believe in being a balanced nerd. No, I don’t really. More like, I believe in being two kinds of nerd as opposed to just one.