Thursday, February 24, 2005

so i took a train to washington on friday [amtrak: cheapest], tagging along with my father on his business trip. needless to say he only spent one day out of four on actual business, but that was wholly expected. anyway, here is how strange washington really is.

first thing i noticed, the pavements were at least twice that of newyork, plus theres only 1/100th of people walking there... effect: ghost town. all the while im expecting tumbleweed to blow past... but i had to settle for a dunkin'donuts bag... sigh... it could be because i arrived on a weekend, and a holiday weekend at that, and all of washington's workers filed out on trains and planes to go home into suburbia. it felt really desolate compared to nyc. so we checked into our hotel pretty fast: knowing my father it is immediately the cheapest hotel in the district, be-damned to class or stars or anything else. surprisingly it wasn't bad at all... defintely a good choice... one of few he makes... yep. few.

visited the washington monument and lincoln's memorial during the time i was there, plus the vietnam memorial. i saw another dunkin'donuts bag inside the reflecting pool [what is it with these people????] the water was greenish and horrible. ensuing conversation:
me: look at the dog in the water [a couple's golden retriever swimming in the pool]
father's frn: they'll have to get a new dog.
or something along that lengths. really horrible. maybe becauase of the varied birdlife settling in the pool? im not an expert on ducks. noreally! think i saw some geese and mandarin ducks [def. mandarin ducks, with the iridescent green feathers] though... possibly. ducks in the reflecting pool? seabirds also. there were quite alot of them, quacking and stuff, perhaps brought down the image of the monuement reflected in the water... nahh. read the getty'sburg address on lincoln's memorail... thought about what would happen if they had lost the war... refused to take a picture of lincoln on his seat. i mean come on, its all glorified wishy-washy-ness-ness, dunt see the point of elevating someone to semi-deity status. any american diehards, please stone me now. vietnam memorial was more inspiring, a rather simple but poignant tribute to the people who died in vietnam. its a asymetrical wall cut into a small hill, with panels engraved with all the names of the people deceased. now all thats left is to catalogue not only the american heroes, but the innocent vietnamese civilians who died under gunfire from both sides. is anyone leaping forward to the task?

righto... took a trip into suburbia... its mind-boggling, the small-town life, esp. to singaporeans becos we dunt noe anything about it. imagine these small, isolated groups of houses seprated by miles and milesof unwinding highway... how does anyone communicate or even know anyone is there? exactly. mind boggling. miles nad miles of highway, cutting through stands of deadwood in the dark of winter, ironically called the greenway. didn't take much note of the surroundigns since i was plagued by this horrible case of car-sickness... like nausea... NAUSEA OVERWHELMING NAUSEA NAUSEA *blegh* we ate lunch. that much i gathered. nice lunch. in small town. with its own college. NAUSEA NAUSEA NAUSEA NAUSEA NAUSEA. then i get a shocking clarification of commercialization after coming back into the city. right next to the pentagon [i.e. that super-important, super-high-tech military base - remember it?] is this huge shopping mall called pentagon city... *pauses for realisation to sink in* yep. a huge shopping mall... helloo can we spell lucrative? l-u-c-r-a-t-i-v-e. furthermore i learned the pentagon was meant to be a war hospital. hmm... planning and implementing "fear and awe" war strategies from a hospital...hmm... i'm sorry, please wait while i fix my skewed perspective. oh wait... it isn't me after all.

let see... what else happened. erm... oh yeah... visited capitol hill. now, i rightly feel like strangling the inventor of the gate-way metal-detector-thing. it is the bane of my life. theres always this niggling feeling that as you walk thru its going to ring and those indifferent security guards are going to regard you as a terrorist. ten thousand of them, scattered around capitol hill. imagine that. overall it gave me a bad taste in my mouth... like NAUSEA. i think i'll repeat this. glorified wishy-washy-ness-ness... just because i like the words. anyhow... the whole moving, melodramatic process of congress rather has me down. esp.after i learned that while being the nation's capital, washington itself dosn't have a representative int he house of representatives... is it just me who thinks thats a little strange? here, take my advice: visit capitol hill once in your life, just for the experience, and then avoid it like the plague. i think though, it would be cool to have enough importance that you can walk about there with permission to open every door and have no one challenge you, other than that... its not visitor-orientated, its security-orientated, or at least it appears to be. saw at least two people carrying machine guns, plus one secret service guy [couldbe] ontop of the white house. pondered how far one could get if one jumped the gates and starting sprinting towards the white house. probably a meter would be applaudable. one strange thing that bears mentioning is the greenhouse/conservatory that is right next to the hill... hmm... i would like to hear the original reasoning that has it positioned there, other than tradition of course. the answer, predictably... is tradition. sigh.

visited national air and space museum and the halocaust museum. i'm not a museum person. the halocaust museum was rather trying though... its a little hard to understand what would flame someone, and then somepeople, and then some countries to effect wholesale genocide. i still don't get it. sheer madness?

final impression. washington, district of columbia, is a massive office, without the facilities and housing to accomodate actual *life*. it is also built on a swamp [i.e. the pentagon is sinking]. hehe... swamp. this leaves it seeming like an old western abandoned town come weekends and holidays, when its life, all the little people, bleed out of it. bleed bleed. for all the hyperbole it gathers for being the nation's capital, walk along the empty streets and feel a little sad for this not-big-enough-to-qualify-representation-state-, so that the governemnt people who work there and keep the nation running... gets taxation witout representation. a rather cynical view of washington. yep.