That's right folks, I had my first official prolonged, non-family member visit. KT and Jason, two of my friends from college, braved the terrible Friday afternoon east coast traffic to make their way down to my side of the potomac!
When they got here, we headed down to Old Town for a stroll down the waterfront, dinner, and some of the best ice cream I've ever had (chocolate orange... yum!).
I also told them about the amazing water goblet playing guy that is usually by the Torpedo Factory on the weekends.
Side note: check out this video of him playing What Child is This?
Anyway. Saturday was the most important. Saturday was the day Jason became a true American. Having never been to America's capitol before, he was pretty jazzed to check out all the sights.
The first stop: the Pentagon Memorial. On our way over (we had to walk to the memorial from the Pentagon bus station), we were questioned by a guard who wanted to know if we had security passes. Apparently we took the wrong path and ended up in a secure location by accident. Whoops. Crisis averted, we made it to the memorial itself.
We were slightly confused about the way it was laid out, the benches are arranged by the birth year of each victim, and some face one south while others face north. We also couldn't quite figure out why there were several benches representing children who were younger than 10-years-old. Our guess was that they had gone to work with a parent that morning. I've since done some more research on the memorial and I discovered that the benches represent everyone that died in the Pentagon as well as each passenger on the plane, which explains the 3-year-old kid. The direction the bench faces is determined by whether that individual was in the Pentagon (facing the south) or on the plane (north).
Our LONGEST stop: The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History... we spent about four hours there.
Our biggest FAIL: Our attempt to see the movie Hugo in 3-D. It's supposed to be AMAZING, so we decided to carve two hours out of our sightseeing schedule to see it at a movie theater in Chinatown. Added bonus, at around 4:00 (the movie was at 4:20) it started raining and by that point our legs were very tired from walking around all day. So we trekked the eight blocks to Chinatown (in the cold rain) and made it to the movie theater at 4:17. Unfortunately. The movie was sold out. Bummer. So we walked back to the Mall and went to the Air and Space Museum for 30 min instead.
The birthday dinner: Our other friend Jenny's birthday also happened to be on Saturday and she happened to be in town visiting her bf, so we all met up in Chinatown for dinner. We had Mongolian BBQ. It was delish.
A final act of culture: While we were eating the rain stopped, so since it was still earlyish and Jason really wanted to, we trekked back to the Mall and walked up to see the rest of the major sites, including the Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Korean War Memorial (a first for me), and the Lincoln Monument.
It was an awesome day. And, Jason officially became an American.
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