It's really nice to get to hang out with Max. As fun as the weekdays are, with my mini routines and quests for adventure, it's been so nice to spend time with another human being that isn't Anthony LaPaglia (I watch 'Without A Trace' with my lunch each day), specifically, Maxy.
We spent this morning at a weekly farmer's market at Dupont Circle, which sold many wholesome foods, including Buffalo meat products, funny herbs like 'cilantro' (coriander) and lots of blossom. It's the sort of thing we've never managed to get out of bed early enough to do in London, with Spitalfields and Columbia Road Flower Market (actually we did do that once - preparing for the wedding wiped out any tendency to lie in on a Sunday morning), so it's nice that we're living in a city, but feel like tourists, so make the effort to do stuff.
Keeping the touristy theme and inspired by yesterday's segways, we rode the metro to a whole new part of town to get the open-top tour bus that'd take us all over the city, so we can get a sense of how it's all put together. It was really terrifying when Max showed me a map of DC and how the capitol (where we were, after quite a few metro stops) is the centre of the city. What's terrifying is that our 'world', and that of most white middle class people, is solely in the west of the city - there's an entire half of DC that kind of doesn't feature. The east is very deprived and run down and pretty dangerous, and it's kind of scary that it basically doesn't exist for a lot of people (including cartographers) here.
By the time we got to the bus place, it was waaaayy too freezing cold and overcast for any open-top bus fun, so we went in to explore the Union Station, which is the main train station here. Much like Grand Central, it's in an amazingly grand building, and there's a big shopping mall there. The basement is a gigantic food hall, boasting stands selling every kind of fast food you could ever imagine - it was extraordinary.
There was also a very strange movie theatre down in the basement, that was kind of cavernous and almost as though a 50s cinema had been carved out of the rock the station is built on. We decided to see '21', because it's been top of the box office for a few weeks, so we figured it must be quite good to generate that much word-of-mouth success. In good news, the cinema had amazing seats that tipped back to allow you more legroom than you knew what to do with and no-one shouted at the screen. In bad news, the reason no-one shouted at the screen is because '21' is so unutterably awful, no-one would waste their breath. It was also the kind of cinema where there are many more people in the screen at the end of the movie than at the beginning, because people spend all day roaming between screens without buying tickets for each film. I should imagine even those freeloaders felt due a refund after seeing '21'.
It was still freezing when we thankfully emerged from the film, so we took a quick look at the Capitol (after Max had explained over lunch how the Senate and House of Representatives work) and headed back to the apartment for an exciting TV charity event called 'Night Of Too Many Stars', that we'd been looking forward to all week (Jon Stewart! Will Arnett! Matthew Broderick!).
Unfortunately, much like our attempts to ride the tour bus and see a good film, the show was a big disappointment, with the only real triumph of today being that we managed to get our oven to work. Woo!
But tomorrow we move into our new apartment and Maxy starts his job in earnest, so the future is bright and I feel like our life here can really begin.
* Maxy and I are engaged in an ongoing numberplate game, in an attempt to spot cars from every state in the US. So far, we've had many Washington DCs (complete with Taxation Without Representation on them), Marylands and Virginias. I even got a California and a Texas when I was in Georgetown. Perhaps the most exciting so far has been a diplomat one, though I guess we can expect to see quite a lot of those...
2 comments:
Yay, someone else who plays the numberplate game! We had one trip to New Hampshire where I saw around 20 of the states, which was terribly exciting, until we got back to our place and realised that the car that had been parked outside for the whole time we'd been living here was from Hawaii. Yes, Hawaii. How it got there, I do not know. But there it was...
DAMMIT! I was going to make exactly the same comment, and grace beat me to it, damn her nose.
Glad that 21 is pants. I've been vaguely feeling like I should go and see it. I can now tick that off my list of things to do, giving me a sense of achievement
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