National Mall

On Monday, October 6, we slept in a little.  We had a reservation for the 3 p.m. tour at the United States Capitol, and they suggested that we be there by 2:15, in case there was a crowd at security, but otherwise we had the whole day to do the normal tourist things that one does in Washington.

We walked the twenty minutes down 16^th Street to Lafayette Square.  On the way, we popped into St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was quaint but not particularly interesting.  There was a demonstration going on, with banners and signs, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the north side of the White House.  The demonstrators were chanting something about wanting Vietnam to leave Laos and Cambodia alone.  We crossed to the White House side of Pennsylvania Avenue.  There were metal police barriers in front of the seven-foot-high spiked metal fence.   A few days before, an armed man had scaled the fence and gotten into an open door, running past an unguarded stairway that led to the President’s family quarters, before being cornered in the East Room.  The head of the Secret Service had had to resign.  We hadn’t planned this trip early enough to get into an official White House tour, but we decided not to climb the fence and let ourselves in.

We went around to the south side of the White House, which required circumnavigating the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.  There were many more tourists on the south side than on the north.  The north side, fronting Pennsylvania Avenue, seems more businesslike.  The south side, with its broad lawn and little side gardens rolling down a lengthy hill, is more relaxed.

We backtracked a little and ended up going down 17^th Street to Constitution Avenue.  A demonstration of some sort had just ended, in front of the American Red Cross Building, involving a large Russian flag.  Presumably, it had involved the death two days earlier of a Swiss Red Cross worker in Ukraine, with the Russians and Ukrainians blaming each other for the shelling that killed him.

We crossed over into the gigantic National Mall, following the path from Constitution Gardens to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the famous black Wall with 58,000 names of American war dead.  No one in either of our families died in Vietnam, nor did anyone we knew.  Yet, the sheer weight of all those names, made somewhat more manageable by their containment on that finite space, is a sad burden.  What for?

The Lincoln Memorial was the most crowded place on this whole trip, full of school kids and other tourists.  Lincoln himself, enshrined here like a god in a Greek temple, said best what it was all about, with his Second Inaugural Address on the north wall of the chamber and the Gettysburg Address on the south wall—two of the shortest major speeches in American history, yet probably the two greatest.  For him, saving the Union was a matter of saving the future of democracy itself, while slavery was the great sin for which we were punished by a horrible, horrible war.   One can question whether he was right, whether keeping the United States intact was worth over 600,000 military dead and a now-incalculable number of civilian casualties (at least in the tens of thousands).  Our character as a nation has been severely warped, for the long term and perhaps permanently, both by slavery and by the Civil War.  Was there really a danger that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth” if the South had been allowed to go its nasty, brutal way?  Maybe, maybe not.  Certainly, the end of slavery in the United States was a great, great good achieved by this disaster.  Our main difference with Europe and East Asia is that the World Wars touched us relatively lightly.  Our trauma came earlier.

We went back along the south side of the Reflecting Pool, past the World War II Memorial.  We missed the new Martin Luther King Memorial: I wasn’t sure where it was and I was beginning to worry about time.  It was a very pleasant day, in the 60s with sunshine, but it’s a substantial hike (two miles) from one end (the Lincoln Memorial) to the other (the Capitol).  We climbed the hill to the Washington Monument, reopened in May after being damaged in an August 2011 earthquake.  Like for the White House, we had decided on this trip too late to be able to get tickets to go inside and up to the top.  I hadn’t realized that the Washington Monument was on a hill, right in the middle of the National Mall.

We headed for the National Gallery of Art, which is in two buildings at the northeast corner of the Mall.  We cut through the sculpture garden and were tempted to have lunch at the pleasant Pavilion Café there.  Lonely Planet says that the best restaurants on the Mall are the three cafes at the National Gallery.  All three have small menus, but the one with the widest variety is the Cascade Café, a large cafeteria in the underground concourse between the West and East Buildings, next to a skylit waterfall.  We decided to eat there, though we were also tempted by the Garden Café, which looked nice, in the West Building between the entrance and the gift shop.  Maybe, as things went, we would have been better off at either the Pavilion or the Garden.   Both of us, after looking around at the rather unappealing possibilities, ended up with curried chicken.  I also had the brussels sprouts and rice pilaf sides, while Mary Joy had a salad from the salad bar.

We now had about an hour before we needed to leave, if we were to be at the Capitol Visitors Center by 2:15.  A major Degas-Cassatt exhibit had just finished the day before, but it turned out that the centerpiece of the gallery’s French Impressionism-Post-Impressionism permanent collection is Degas’s wax sculpture, the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, and they also have a major Cassatt, the wonderful Boating Party, as well as a whole roomful of Cezannes, and much more.  We only had time to see this part of the museum, then pop across the hall for my Turner fix: the best of their three Turners being the Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, from 1835.  It would be nice to get a chance to visit the National Gallery again, when we have more time to spend there, though Mary Joy now has a bias against the place, for reasons that will be discussed below.

We walked up Capitol Hill and around to the rear, where the new Visitors Center is belowground, between the Capitol”s South Wing and the Library of Congress.  Security was just a matter of a guard looking through our daypacks.  No liquids at all are allowed.  The suggestion that we arrive 45 minutes before the time of our tour turned out to be unnecessary in this case.  We got right through security with no delay and were able to get tickets for the 2:20 tour, forty minutes before our reservation.

The tour starts with a 13-minute large-screen film called “Out of Many, One.”  Lonely Planet calls the film “cheesy,” but says that the tour greatly improves afterwards.  Our experience was pretty much the opposite.  The film was pleasant; the tour itself was dull.  You filed into one of several lines and were given a headset.  The docent leading the group in your line (in our case, a dark-haired young woman with glasses) talked to you through the headset, while the various groups were led up, down and around, trying to stay out of each other’s way.  There are a lot of statues, some paintings, some old furniture (in the old Supreme Chambers—vacated many years ago), and a demonstration of an acoustical trick—our docent took off her microphone and had us take off our headphones and stand around the floor marker that showed where John Quincy Adams had sat when he was in the House of Representatives after his term as President.  Then she went across to another point in the room (the old House chamber, now a statuary hall) bent over toward the floor and spoke in a normal speaking voice, and we heard her as if she had been right next to us.  The Capitol dome is in process of repair, so only part of the painting in the cupola, The Apotheosis of Washington, was visible.  I’ll have to say that I didn’t feel that I was missing much.  The whole tour, film included, lasted about an hour.  Some people complained that our docent was rude.  I wouldn’t say that, but she was set on moving things along.  The tour doesn’t take you to the current Senate and House Chambers—you need a gallery pass to enter those, apparently easy enough to get from the office of your Senator or Representative, or, if you are not American, from a desk in the Capitol.  Neither house was currently in session.  I wasn’t interested in seeing either room (you can see them on CSPAN, which televises congressional floor proceedings), so we followed the tunnel to the Library of Congress., arriving just in time for the tour of that building.

We liked that tour much better than the other.  Part of that was the personality of our docent, a wise-cracking octogenarian lawyer named Chuck.  Part of it was that the building itself is more ornate and less self-important.  After the tour, we went through an exhibition on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then one on Thomas Jefferson’s personal library (which formed the basis of the current Library), then went downstairs to an exhibition on George and Ira Gershwin, including George’s piano.

By then, Mary Joy was not feeling well.  We went outside and sat on a bench for a while, then went two blocks south, to the Capitol South Metro station, and caught a train to the Metro Center station, where we transferred to the Red Line, going to Dupont Circle and from there walking to our hotel.

Mary Joy had intestinal tract problems.  Food poisoning?  We had both eaten the same thing at the Cascade Café, except that she had had a salad.  Or had she picked up some bacterium elsewhere?  In any case, she was in no condition to go to dinner at the restaurant we had picked out from Lonely Planet, the Tabard Inn.  She insisted that I go and give her a report, afterwards picking up some soup and a roll for her from Whole Foods.

I went to the Tabard Inn, a few blocks away.  It is a small boutique hotel.  You enter through a small lobby and follow the restaurant signs through a lounge of the sort that you’d find in a B & B.  A small (two-man?) light jazz ensemble was playing there.  The restaurant is small, entered through the bar.  I had brought along the free Washington Post provided by Hotel Rouge, to read during dinner, though it was a little difficult due to the low level of lighting (Ironically, it would have been even more difficult to read during dinner at Afterwords, the restaurant at Kramerbooks, since the lighting there was substantially worse).  I had a branzino, a European sea bass, which I liked, even though, as the waiter had forewarned me, it had head, tail and bones.  I’ll have to admit that I am not the foodie that Mary Joy is.  Like at most restaurants in Washington, the meal was pricier than it would have in the Twin Cities.

I went to Whole Foods, got the soup and roll, as well as some things for breakfast the next morning, and returned to the hotel.  Mary Joy was feeling enough better to enjoy her soup and roll.  Her ailment was not like the 24-hour virus that she had caught in Salzburg in 2000, passing it to me as we went on to Bamberg.  That had been nasty.

So we went to bed.