Walking in Washington.
Nov. 5th, 2006 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningIn August we went to Washington; this post describes some of the things we did, and some of the thoughts I had. There are quite a few pictures – if you want to see the full set of photographs, click here!
We were staying in the centre of Silver Spring; a suburb of Washington, DC (though Silver Spring is itself in Maryland). It was a clean, downtown sort of place; the grass was plastic, the people well dressed. It was a commercial, rather than a residential part of town.
But it didn’t have some of the things I expected to see in Downtown, USA; whilst there were lots of coffee bars – Starbucks, of course, and a bakery – there wasn’t a diner, somewhere to sit and eat a big breakfast (pancakes! I wanted pancakes and maple syrup!), with wise-cracking, middle-aged waitresses shouting their orders to the cook. It was too sterile, too clean for that.
There wasn’t a drugstore that I could see either; what there was was a Whole Foods Market. There was an article in the Independent (which of course I can’t find now) saying that they weren’t quite as squeaky clean as they make out; but to these jaundiced eyes, they were great.
There was something about the quality of the food, the way it was laid out and arranged – there was so much space – that made shopping there such a pleasure: it was so much more pleasant that going to Tesco. Everything just looked so good: piles of fresh fruit – everything open, nothing prepacked, and a lot of organic produce; the fish looked wonderful, the meat – a huge selection, with lots of cuts I didn’t recognise and hadn’t heard of (and again, a lot of it organic) – looked inviting. I just wanted to buy everything. It all just seemed so stylish.
At the till, I placed my small basked on the conveyor. (Though I wanted to buy the whole shop, I actually only bought some apples, some carrots, some chocolate and several bottles of water.) The cashier looked up, bored, and said, “Please empty the basket.” Because clearly she couldn’t reach in and take my items to swipe them. Oh well. I took everything out of the basket, and put it all back on the conveyor. I was still holding the basket: there was nowhere to put it. “Where should I put this?”
She looked at me like I was mad. I explained, “There’s nowhere to put it.” (There really wasn’t; there were displays at the end of the conveyor, where I would have expected to see a stack of empty baskets.) She took the basked and looked around; she couldn’t work out where to put it, either. After a short while, she shouted at one of the kids putting out some goods, who came and took it from her. Now why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Paper or plastic?” she then barked at me. I looked at her blankly: she needed a response, clearly – I mean, she had asked me a question – but I had no idea what she was talking about. Did she want to know how I was going to pay – cash or credit card, I imagined – but she hadn’t run anything through the swipe yet, so it couldn’t have been that. I told her that I didn’t understand the question. She and the people growing increasingly restless behind me in the queue looked at me as if I had two heads. And I spoke funny.
“Would you like a paper bag or a plastic bag?” she explained. To be honest, I really didn’t care. I felt like saying one of each. So I did.
The hotel had free internet access in the lobby. I wasn’t sleeping well, waking up early – very early – so I would go down and log on, catch up on email, watch the sun rise and the moon set, read LJ and catch up on the news – all before going down to a slimline swimming pool – it had only two lanes – for twenty minutes. All before breakfast.
It was reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
itchyfidget’s journal that I realised there was something wrong with the planes. Looking on BBC.com, I slowly unravelled the whole story, and began to think that we might not get back to the UK so smoothly. So, no planes flying into or out of Heathrow, then. But we were flying via Amsterdam. There wasn’t much on the KLM site, either. And there was an enormous amount of conflicting information about luggage – what should be in hand luggage and what should be in the hold. I was worried about putting electrical goods in the hold – that has been a no-no for years, but if you can’t have them in your hand luggage, and you can’t put them in the hold – well, where the hell should I put all my electrical stuff then?
I was using the internet obsessively; it was strange: because I could, I felt the need to keep up to speed with everything that was going on. Clearly, addicted.
I decided to reconfirm our tickets, just in case, so I called NorthWest Airlines, KLM’s partner. (I had tried to do it online, but it required all sorts of stuff to register, which frankly didn’t seem worth it.) Their phone system had voice-recognition. Well it was meant to; except that it clearly didn’t recognise my accent at all. It didn’t even understand me when I spelt out my surname.
Eventaully I spoke to something pretending to be a real person, who told me all the window seats were already allocated and that we couldn’t get two seats together (three days before the flight? Huh!) – the closest we could get were two seats across an aisle; which is what we took.
The day after my brother’s wedding, my wife wasn’t feeling well, and she decided not to venture out; whilst I wanted to go exploring. I walked through Silver Spring and caught the Metro to Foggy Bottom (the child in me laughed), I got lost, and then I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue – away from the Whitehouse – towards Georgetown. It was hot – very hot: the sun was high by this point. I tried to keep in the shade. The light through shadows across the building, chasing the bricks into relief and creating new patterns on the walls.
The road cross a highway and Rock Creek, and joined M Street. Washington is a geometric city: a grid of streets, identified by letters from south to north and numbers from east to west; and then there are large avenues – named after the different States – cutting through the grid at angles; where the avenues meet are large plazas and squares – well circles: Du Pont Circle, Washington Circle and so on.
Georgetown feels quite different from central Washington: it is leafy, low rise, and brightly painted. Quite and residential, it reminded of Hampstead in London, where I grew up; except that Hampstead isn’t home to a couple of universities.
There were brick houses and wooden, clapboard houses; some beautiful buildings. The trees cast shadows, and I rested in the shade; I poured more suntan lotion on, and drank lots of water.
I zigzagged the grid of streets in Georgetown, from M Street up to N, then up 31st; being old and preserved, the streets aren’t as regular as they are downtown – a bit like Greenwich Village, where they go off at odd angles and with names, surprising after the regularity of letters and numbers.
I walked up to Dumbarton Oaks, a large house and synonymous park; both were closed, undergoing renovation. I had heard Stravinsky’s suite “Dumbarton Oaks” in the Proms a weeks or so before, and I had been intrigued as to why a Russian composer would name a piece after a small town on the Clyde in Scotland; and now I realised that he hadn’t. I don’t know the story (so of course I now have to look it up on wikipedia…) – OK, it was commissioned by the owner of the house to celebrate his wedding anniversary; and it is a concerto, not a suite.
I wandered around Georgetown for a couple of hours, crossing back and forth. It was very photogenic: the brick houses were rich in architectural detail – and the sun brought them out. I walked around, hypnotised, taking photograph after photograph.
I had a late lunch in Martin’s Tavern, on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and N Street, where I sat in a booth for one, reading a book (I actually finished one and started another), drinking rather good beer, and eating a really delicious, genuine (as in not poncy, just very good) hamburger and chips. It was all very satisfying.
That evening, my wife and I went back to the Adega Wine Cellar for supper. Knowing the way things worked, it felt much more comfortable this time. We both ate really delicious tuna salad – seared, rare tuna on a really good salad – and had a lovely bottle of something (though I can’t remember what). It was a lovely, warm evening. Just really good.
We were flying out the next day: my brother, my wife and I. My mother was staying on for a day or so, going up to New York to visit an elderly friend (the same person who had me and G. catsit for her when I first went to the States, twenty five years ago; she has the same flat on East 72nd St).
My mother, my wife and I wanted to do something before we had to go (we were still unsure about flying; my brother was booked on BA: he had meant to fly the day before, and BA had confirmed his flight before cancelling it, but they guaranteed that they would fly him back to the UK that day. Just as well, as he was flying onto Sri Lanka the next day).
So we walked around Silver Spring on a glorious, sunny Sunday morning. Away from the commercial side of Silver Spring – the art deco mall, the hotels and restaurants, the five-storey Barnes & Noble – the town became rather more grimy; rather more real: the pavements didn’t look like you could eat you lunch off them (which they did in the centre). The building were low-rise, and there were strings of telegraph poles.
I love telegraph poles; where I lived in south Oxford had phone lines strung between the houses, punctuating the sky. The lines add geometry to the sky.
Walking around Silver Spring felt much more like looking at the Americana of the movies: a small town. It was quiet – the streets were empty, there was barely a car in the road. We wandered back and forth.
Looking.
Flying back was fine. We were frisked down at security, and not allowed any liquids, and had to take our shoes off – though I think they have done that in the US for a while. There were no other restrictions – so my camera and my walkman and various bits of cables and battery chargers could happily sit in my hand luggage.
My brother was told there would be no BA flights that day, and BA shunted him onto a Virgin flight back to Heathrow (which seemed a bit strange: if I had been a bomber and I couldn’t fly on BA, I think I might just have bought a ticket on a Virgin plane).
I read, my wife slept; and we got back to Edinburgh more or less on time.
We were staying in the centre of Silver Spring; a suburb of Washington, DC (though Silver Spring is itself in Maryland). It was a clean, downtown sort of place; the grass was plastic, the people well dressed. It was a commercial, rather than a residential part of town.
But it didn’t have some of the things I expected to see in Downtown, USA; whilst there were lots of coffee bars – Starbucks, of course, and a bakery – there wasn’t a diner, somewhere to sit and eat a big breakfast (pancakes! I wanted pancakes and maple syrup!), with wise-cracking, middle-aged waitresses shouting their orders to the cook. It was too sterile, too clean for that.
There wasn’t a drugstore that I could see either; what there was was a Whole Foods Market. There was an article in the Independent (which of course I can’t find now) saying that they weren’t quite as squeaky clean as they make out; but to these jaundiced eyes, they were great.
There was something about the quality of the food, the way it was laid out and arranged – there was so much space – that made shopping there such a pleasure: it was so much more pleasant that going to Tesco. Everything just looked so good: piles of fresh fruit – everything open, nothing prepacked, and a lot of organic produce; the fish looked wonderful, the meat – a huge selection, with lots of cuts I didn’t recognise and hadn’t heard of (and again, a lot of it organic) – looked inviting. I just wanted to buy everything. It all just seemed so stylish.
At the till, I placed my small basked on the conveyor. (Though I wanted to buy the whole shop, I actually only bought some apples, some carrots, some chocolate and several bottles of water.) The cashier looked up, bored, and said, “Please empty the basket.” Because clearly she couldn’t reach in and take my items to swipe them. Oh well. I took everything out of the basket, and put it all back on the conveyor. I was still holding the basket: there was nowhere to put it. “Where should I put this?”
She looked at me like I was mad. I explained, “There’s nowhere to put it.” (There really wasn’t; there were displays at the end of the conveyor, where I would have expected to see a stack of empty baskets.) She took the basked and looked around; she couldn’t work out where to put it, either. After a short while, she shouted at one of the kids putting out some goods, who came and took it from her. Now why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Paper or plastic?” she then barked at me. I looked at her blankly: she needed a response, clearly – I mean, she had asked me a question – but I had no idea what she was talking about. Did she want to know how I was going to pay – cash or credit card, I imagined – but she hadn’t run anything through the swipe yet, so it couldn’t have been that. I told her that I didn’t understand the question. She and the people growing increasingly restless behind me in the queue looked at me as if I had two heads. And I spoke funny.
“Would you like a paper bag or a plastic bag?” she explained. To be honest, I really didn’t care. I felt like saying one of each. So I did.
* * *
The hotel had free internet access in the lobby. I wasn’t sleeping well, waking up early – very early – so I would go down and log on, catch up on email, watch the sun rise and the moon set, read LJ and catch up on the news – all before going down to a slimline swimming pool – it had only two lanes – for twenty minutes. All before breakfast.
It was reading
itchyfidget’s journal that I realised there was something wrong with the planes. Looking on BBC.com, I slowly unravelled the whole story, and began to think that we might not get back to the UK so smoothly. So, no planes flying into or out of Heathrow, then. But we were flying via Amsterdam. There wasn’t much on the KLM site, either. And there was an enormous amount of conflicting information about luggage – what should be in hand luggage and what should be in the hold. I was worried about putting electrical goods in the hold – that has been a no-no for years, but if you can’t have them in your hand luggage, and you can’t put them in the hold – well, where the hell should I put all my electrical stuff then?I was using the internet obsessively; it was strange: because I could, I felt the need to keep up to speed with everything that was going on. Clearly, addicted.
I decided to reconfirm our tickets, just in case, so I called NorthWest Airlines, KLM’s partner. (I had tried to do it online, but it required all sorts of stuff to register, which frankly didn’t seem worth it.) Their phone system had voice-recognition. Well it was meant to; except that it clearly didn’t recognise my accent at all. It didn’t even understand me when I spelt out my surname.
Eventaully I spoke to something pretending to be a real person, who told me all the window seats were already allocated and that we couldn’t get two seats together (three days before the flight? Huh!) – the closest we could get were two seats across an aisle; which is what we took.
* * *
The day after my brother’s wedding, my wife wasn’t feeling well, and she decided not to venture out; whilst I wanted to go exploring. I walked through Silver Spring and caught the Metro to Foggy Bottom (the child in me laughed), I got lost, and then I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue – away from the Whitehouse – towards Georgetown. It was hot – very hot: the sun was high by this point. I tried to keep in the shade. The light through shadows across the building, chasing the bricks into relief and creating new patterns on the walls.
Pennsylvania Avenue
The road cross a highway and Rock Creek, and joined M Street. Washington is a geometric city: a grid of streets, identified by letters from south to north and numbers from east to west; and then there are large avenues – named after the different States – cutting through the grid at angles; where the avenues meet are large plazas and squares – well circles: Du Pont Circle, Washington Circle and so on.
Georgetown feels quite different from central Washington: it is leafy, low rise, and brightly painted. Quite and residential, it reminded of Hampstead in London, where I grew up; except that Hampstead isn’t home to a couple of universities.
There were brick houses and wooden, clapboard houses; some beautiful buildings. The trees cast shadows, and I rested in the shade; I poured more suntan lotion on, and drank lots of water.
I zigzagged the grid of streets in Georgetown, from M Street up to N, then up 31st; being old and preserved, the streets aren’t as regular as they are downtown – a bit like Greenwich Village, where they go off at odd angles and with names, surprising after the regularity of letters and numbers.
I walked up to Dumbarton Oaks, a large house and synonymous park; both were closed, undergoing renovation. I had heard Stravinsky’s suite “Dumbarton Oaks” in the Proms a weeks or so before, and I had been intrigued as to why a Russian composer would name a piece after a small town on the Clyde in Scotland; and now I realised that he hadn’t. I don’t know the story (so of course I now have to look it up on wikipedia…) – OK, it was commissioned by the owner of the house to celebrate his wedding anniversary; and it is a concerto, not a suite.
I wandered around Georgetown for a couple of hours, crossing back and forth. It was very photogenic: the brick houses were rich in architectural detail – and the sun brought them out. I walked around, hypnotised, taking photograph after photograph.
I had a late lunch in Martin’s Tavern, on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and N Street, where I sat in a booth for one, reading a book (I actually finished one and started another), drinking rather good beer, and eating a really delicious, genuine (as in not poncy, just very good) hamburger and chips. It was all very satisfying.
* * *
That evening, my wife and I went back to the Adega Wine Cellar for supper. Knowing the way things worked, it felt much more comfortable this time. We both ate really delicious tuna salad – seared, rare tuna on a really good salad – and had a lovely bottle of something (though I can’t remember what). It was a lovely, warm evening. Just really good.
* * *
We were flying out the next day: my brother, my wife and I. My mother was staying on for a day or so, going up to New York to visit an elderly friend (the same person who had me and G. catsit for her when I first went to the States, twenty five years ago; she has the same flat on East 72nd St).
My mother, my wife and I wanted to do something before we had to go (we were still unsure about flying; my brother was booked on BA: he had meant to fly the day before, and BA had confirmed his flight before cancelling it, but they guaranteed that they would fly him back to the UK that day. Just as well, as he was flying onto Sri Lanka the next day).
So we walked around Silver Spring on a glorious, sunny Sunday morning. Away from the commercial side of Silver Spring – the art deco mall, the hotels and restaurants, the five-storey Barnes & Noble – the town became rather more grimy; rather more real: the pavements didn’t look like you could eat you lunch off them (which they did in the centre). The building were low-rise, and there were strings of telegraph poles.
I love telegraph poles; where I lived in south Oxford had phone lines strung between the houses, punctuating the sky. The lines add geometry to the sky.
Walking around Silver Spring felt much more like looking at the Americana of the movies: a small town. It was quiet – the streets were empty, there was barely a car in the road. We wandered back and forth.
Looking.
* * *
Flying back was fine. We were frisked down at security, and not allowed any liquids, and had to take our shoes off – though I think they have done that in the US for a while. There were no other restrictions – so my camera and my walkman and various bits of cables and battery chargers could happily sit in my hand luggage.
My brother was told there would be no BA flights that day, and BA shunted him onto a Virgin flight back to Heathrow (which seemed a bit strange: if I had been a bomber and I couldn’t fly on BA, I think I might just have bought a ticket on a Virgin plane).
I read, my wife slept; and we got back to Edinburgh more or less on time.