Monuments, big stuff and an education in tacky

Greetings from Washington DC. It's an interesting place, much like Canberra on 'roids, in the sense that it is a pre-planned city focussed around a vast array of government buildings, but with a slightly odd and artificial feeling. The upside is that it is full of highly paid young federal staffers, so there are heaps of great pubs and things to do. The downside is the high concentration of "crazies". One effect of the proliferation in mobile phones and handsets is that so many people stand in the open talking to themselves, making it hard to tell the difference between inane yabbers and genuine crazies. In Manhattan, they are inane yabbers ("yo, I told him it was my bag, it was my bag, yo, I told him it was my bag") whereas in Washington DC there is an astounding level of homelessness and people standing on street corners twitching and yelling abuse at people across the road.

Anyway, here are the happy snaps. You may be familiar with the White House.

It is another of those great optical illusions. In photos, it always looks very large and a long way away. It is in fact not very big at all and remarkably close to the road. The Prez was (we think) on the right in the West Wing just behind those trees.

Across the road is Blair House. Remember how earlier this year, John Howard, as a guest of George W, failed to decline an invite to stay there, forcing Barack Obama to stay in a hotel rather than in this house? A great moment for Australia's reputation.

We took the wind and rain with us to Washington. Here is the Washington Monument, built in 1858. As young Aussie tourists would say, a "big f&%k off obelisk".

And here is a professional-quality photograph trying to copy a scene from Forrest Gump. It was also the site of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.

Abraham Lincoln gets a lot of play in Washington. His monument is bigger than the WWII, Korea and Vietnam War monuments (also all on this mall) combined.

This is Ford's theatre where he was shot.

And we just could not resist the opportunity to take in a show at that famous venue where we sat about two metres away from his booth.

We frankly couldn't give a top hat what the show was - we just wanted to gawk and be able to say we had been there.

We spent a day touring Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court building and the Library of Congress. Here is the Capitol. The dome (or "Rotunda") sits atop a walkway which joins the House and the Senate.

It is quite palatial. This is the inside of the dome. The image is of various goddesses crowding around George Washington, who is in heaven and holding symbols of power.

It is the third attempt at a dome. The first was burned down by the British in 1814, the second started to collapse and was quickly dismantled, and the third has stood the test of time.

As is appropriate in all places in DC, the Capitol has several statues and paintings of George Washington. The Capitol also has, in its very centre, an underground crypt intended to hold George Washington's body. Sounds a lot like the great hero-worship temples we saw in Hanoi, Delhi, etc, doesn't it? The only problem was that the crypt was not finished until 25 years after the hero died, and when the dignitaries turned up at the farm to collect the body, Washington's nephew refused, so now there is an empty crypt.

Ok, let's go tacky. People spotting is important. We saw the Prez.

JFK even made an appearance. (You should have seen the first take of this photo - very saucy.)

And this is the best shot we could get of a school trip chaperone at the Vietnam War Memorial. DC was crawling with school groups from around the country. It seems for every 10 students, there is an adult chaperone to ensure the kids keep their hands off each other. Heavy petting on DC bus trips is apparently a competitive sport so the chaperones have their work cut out for them. Note the matching jacket.

Near Ford's theatre was a quite brilliant International Spy Museum. It glorified espionage, and didn't mention death and torture and other pitfalls of being outed as a spy, but they had cool stuff to look at, interesting WWII training movies, a running gimmick whereby you had to assume a new identity and get tested on it as you went, and they recreated a Cuban military installation so you can practise crawling through air vents and eavesdropping on revolutionary banter. The museum yielded yet another photo of Matt in some sort of hole, presenting an unparalleled opportunity for him to look bald.

Outside "The Washington Club" we saw some Democrat and Republican mascots. (This is as close as we could get because we failed to comply with the dress code for the driveway...)

It was Public Service Tribute Week in DC, so they celebrated by huge defence force recruiting efforts, and War of Independence bands.

Now onto the big stuff. We went (Matt salivating) through the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

They had cool stuff like ICBM's (missiles) ...

Soyez modules (Russian resupply craft) ...

Space station toilets (just continuing another theme of these blogs ... zoom in, use your imagination and be careful of the air lock) ...

A copy of the Hubble space telescope ...

An engine from a Saturn V booster rocket (five of these pushed the Apollo rockets into space) ...

And here is an Apollo astronaut survival kit. Note the "shark repellant". They had all bases covered, didn't they.

And this is the Apollo 11 re-entry module, being the one that brought Neil Armstrong and Co home.

And here endeth the story. The honeymoon is over, as they say in the movies, and we are rotting away in the Los Angeles International airport lounge at the moment, waiting for our flight home.

It has been a pleasure travelling without all of you. Thanks to everyone for working hard and paying income taxes, so that we could receive and squander our K-Rudd stimulus bonuses on cheeky Californian shirazes and chocolate on the other side of the world. It has been great. But on a serious note, thank you so, so much to everyone who contributed to this trip in many ways. A huge thank you to our parents in particular for their truly excessive generosity which made so much of this possible.

Stay tuned for one more blog post - a "sign retrospective", coming soon to a computer near you.

And in the meantime, this is to help Customs identify and nab us for swine flu.