Some People See the Glass as Half Full...: DC Wandering, Friends, and TOTEM!

A few weekends ago, my friend Jason came down from the Big City to visit me in the Capitol City for the weekend.

Love this guy!

I met him at Union Station and we proceeded to walk around the city a little bit... it was only his second time in DC, so he was excited to see more of the memorials/important buildings.

Side of the Postal Museum

First we tried to go to the postal museum, which is conveniently located next to Union Station. I've been there before and I found it fascinating (although my a weird obsession with stamps may have had something to do with that). Unfortunately these plans were foiled by the smoothies we had only partially finished, because drinks are not allowed in the museum.

The building that houses the museum is very cool though. It's also a real post office, so we looked around a little bit, and I managed to snap a quick photo of the ceiling before we left.

I would love this to be my post office!

Then we started walking towards the back side of the Capitol building. I'd never realized you could get there so easily from Union Station. On the way we saw this cute little squirrel "sleeping" on the side of the road.

RIP poor little squirrel.
Now you won't be able to chew anyone's fuel lines.

I've never seen the Capitol building from the back before and it was beautiful! There is so much more to it than I ever realized! We walked around for a little while before heading back home.

The Capitol from the back

The Capitol from the front/side.

Then on Saturday night we saw TOTEM, a Cirque Du Soleil show! We were joined by Jenny and Mik and my friend from school, Jamie. Totem was probably one of my favorite Cirque shows so far (I've seen two others, Kooza and Ova).

The show is sort of an evolution/nature based one, so there were lots of "animal" acts and Native American things and then the introduction of science and technology a little at the end via an appearance by Charles Darwin. There was one hilarious scene where they recreated the monkey to human evolution picture. There weren't as many terrifyingly dare-devilish stunts in this one as there were in Kooza, but there was so much cool artistry and the acts were just fascinating, that I didn't feel like I was missing anything.