We had a delicious brunch at a cafe down the road from Susan's flat, on Anne's recommendation. It was a really cool place, with lots of lanterns hanging from the ceiling, tasty food and particularly cool loos (left), where the walls are lined with album covers.
As we were finishing up, who should we see leaving, but the family from Cafe Hon yesterday! And one of the boys was still wearing a nice string of beads!
We took a tantalising and misguided saunter around the shops after brunch, before packing up and going into town. We visited a particularly cool bookshop which looked like my friend Tom's ideal store - all comics and McSweeneys and rare DVDs.
I didn't really feel the need to linger in Baltimore much longer, but it felt like a waste of the car hire to go back to DC at lunchtime, so we took Anne up on another of her recommendations and went to the Baltimore Museum of Public Works. It's a sewer museum. I obviously had my doubts, but Anne had been so adamant that it was really good and all her other suggestions had been so spot-on that we thought there must be a good reason to go.
Erm, unfortunately it was really boring and a little stinky. I couldn't quite work if they were going for the conceptual, smell-o-vision museum thing or not, but - contrary to the sign outside which proclaimed it to be 'the surprisingly interesting Baltimore Public Works Museum - it was just really boring. I had a bit of fun on a computer game where you drive a massive rubbish truck around Baltimore, but I kept veering onto the pavement and mowing down cars and got the impression that Max was getting a little twitchy about surviving the drive back to DC, so packed that in.
I wasn't sad to leave Baltimore, though am glad we went and would definitely like to go to the baseball again, but there's a weirdy trolley/train that goes straight from DC to outside the stadium on Friday nights, so I think we'd do that in future, rather than sticking around for the whole weekend.
On the way out of town, we drove through Little Italy and managed to find the old, pre-Inner Harbour centre with a cathedral and big statue of Washington. But neither made me any fonder of the place. Max really liked it, though.
It was so early when we got back to DC that after we dropped the car off, we decided to go and see 'Mama Mia'. It was indescribably hot, so the thought of being in an aggressively air conditioned cinema for a couple of hours really appealed. We were basically liquid forms of ourselves by the time we reached the cinema, only to discover that it was sold out!
Extremely reluctantly, I agreed to go back to Union Station, where we'd just dropped off the car, and where there's the weird horrid cinema there, which has bad sound and a deficient projectionist. We hadn't been there since seeing '21' a few months ago and I wasn't too keen to go back, but it all turned out ok.
I wouldn't say that the film was worth the odyssey it took to get there and I was sad to see Colin Firth surrender his dignity, but it was fun enough and the music was ace. It annoyed me that Pierce Brosnan is so handsome (and sings like a bear with an itch), because he was the only really unpleasant person I ever looked after on 'Parkinson', but Julie Walters was hilarious and I just know that Mum's going to love the film.
I much more enjoyed 'Witness', which we watched
when we got back to the flat. We'd put it on our NetFlix queue after our visit to Amish country in Pennsylvania, because Max has never seen it and I haven't seen it for years. It's such a terrific film - all mood and tension and atmosphere and I'd forgotten what an adorable little boy Lukas Haas was, now that he's a slightly gangly grown up.
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