Day 2

Quote of the Day:J.F. Kennedy

Day 2: (Wednesday) Washington D.C.

We rode the Metro train into Washington DC and walked all day long around the "federal mall" they call it (I learned a lot of things today). We saw half of the sites today and we'll see the rest tomorrow.
Our first stop was the Arlington Cemetery. Sadly, before coming here today, I don't think I realized there was a cemetery set aside just for soldiers who have died in war. It was amazing to see though. There were SO many tombs.
Someone told us 300,000 but it seemed like a lot more than that! We walked all around for 30 minutes and never saw the end of the rows. They just went on and on forever it seemed.
I'm amazed at how many people have died to make it possible for us to live in a free country (and this probably wasn't even half of them!)
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was very neat to see. There was a guard standing by the whole time and everyone was so quiet and respectful.
This tomb is dedicated to those whose bodies were never found.

I'm not sure what this structure is for, it looked like an amphitheater of some sort but it was really cool looking so I took a few pictures.



I'm pretty sure this flag flies at half mast all the time to honor all who have ever died in war. I thought that was awesome.
We also saw Pres. J.F. Kennedy's tomb with the eternal flame. I was thinking they should have made a cemetery just for the President's of the United States, but then I guess they all come from different places around the country and probably want to be buried in their hometown, so never mind about that idea.
We then went to see the Washington Memorial. It was awesome to see it up close and in person, as was everything else we have seen.


I learned something new here too- This next picture shows the memorial about 3/4s of the way down and the different color of bricks. I guess they started building it before the Civil War and when the war was over, they couldn't find the same brick so they had to use something else.

Next, we headed over to the museum of natural history which was way awesome! It had every living thing that ever has or does live on the earth. This is a picture of the dinosaur room. I took lots of pictures and sent them to Emma (she LOVES dinosaurs) along with a stuffed long neck.
Most of the animals were positioned in a really cool way, rather than just standing lined up or something. I liked this one- I learned that tigers take their food up into a tree so no other animal can get to it.
This giraffe was pretty funny too.
In the Insect and Butterfly room, Jake held this LIVE cockroach... SICK!!
This is the front room of the museum where there is a huge elephant. I really want to see one of those in real life someday!
On our way to our next stop, we saw many sculptures outside that were part of the art and sculpture museum. This just looks like a normal house right?
Wrong, it caves in rather than sticks out. It was a weird illusion!
Then there were these statues of people with no heads... cool, but a little weird.
This building behind us is the National Archives but the wait was too long, so we just took a picture in front of it.
While walking around we saw this pool with ducks in it and they were all sticking their butts up. It looked pretty funny.


It was really neat to see the State Capital. This is another thing where the physical appearance of it is pretty famous. So that's all we did really, look at it. Again, the wait was too long to get inside.

After the State Capital we went to the Library of Congress. This place was amazing! It was so beautiful inside and I had a hard time imagining that this building held EVERY SINGLE hard copy of EVERY book that was EVER published in the WORLD! Well at least everything they could get their hand on, so maybe not quite every book. But still, that's amazing!

The coolest part about this Library though was, well there were 2 really neat things; 1, was seeing the actual draft of the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and Declaration of Independence. (The real ones were inside the State Capital which had about a 2 hour wait to get inside). But I thought it was almost better to see the drafts because you could see where they crossed things out and added stuff in and it was all hand written.

The other really neat thing was Thomas Jefferson's Library. When the Library of Congress building burnt down, he donated his collection of books to get it started again. He had a TON of books about 5,000! And most of them were his actual book, others were just another copy of a book he had.




Towards the end of our day, during our walk to our last stop- The White House, it started to rain. It wasn't too heavy but we definitely got wet. Afterwards though, there was this gorgeous rainbow.

At this point, I guess I had taken so many pictures that I went through 2 sets of batteries in the camera and didn't have any more so I couldn't take any of the White House. Thankfully my mom had her new video camera which could also take pictures, so that was good, but we found out later that sadly, these were very poor quality pictures... oh well, there's not too many from that video camera.

The White House looks pretty small from here, but we could see it pretty well through the fence. It was just crazy to think that the president of the United States was in there.

Brody found some friends to talk to from Brazil. At first there were only two of them, but after only about 2 minutes he had a whole group of people to talk to in Portuguese! It was pretty funny.

Also today, we're pretty sure that we saw the President drive by! There was a line of cop cars with their sirens blaring but they weren't going very fast and black limos and SUV's. So that was pretty cool!

It was a very fun day! The weather was perfect except for that tiny bit of rain. We did a lot of walking though so I am pooped!