Location Taken: Washington DC
Date Taken: October 2008
Washington DC is at once special and not special to me. I grew up (and still live) right about 20 miles from all the fancy tourist attractions and museums in the heart of the city. And I’ve very rarely visited there.
For me, Washington DC isn’t the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian, all the wonderful touristy goodness that brings people to visit. It’s the ever-crowded beltway, the one way streets, the sheer awkwardness of the area. It’s not a pleasant area to drive in. And that’s what most of my visits have been. Driving.
Oh sure, I’d be driving to somewhere, say an art theater showing an anime movie I want to see (I’ve seen a lot of Ghibli films in the theater, but I was very glad when they got popular enough to hit a closer theater). But it’s the driving I remember.
Some of that may be because of my awesome mapping abilities (I’ve been called a “Living GPS”), and how I just naturally remember the roads I’ve been on. Mainly, though, it’s the aggravation. Driving in Maryland is unpleasant enough. We’ve got a melting pot here, with people coming in from all over the world to live, work, and drive. And they bring their own cultural driving habits with them, which, if you’ve seen any videos of driving, you know that there’s a lot of places that have very… disparate… rules. Add in the fact that this is a very rich area, which means it’s full of people who are very busy (and usually workaholic) and thus distracted in a multitude of ways (cell phones, running late, self-important, etc.), and you learn to expect people to do stupid things. I’ve had a number of close calls, and I’m a pretty predictable driver. That’s the best thing to be, really. Predictable. That way the idiot drivers are right when they assume you’ll just keep on doing what you’re doing when they pass within a foot of your car at top speeds in order to gain five more feet (and no turn signal, of course).
Still, it’s not good for my nerves to drive in DC. They get all frayed and frazzled, and then I have to pat them back down again so they don’t catch on things.
Every so often, though, I head down there to be a bit touristy. Most of my visits were school trips. It is somewhat nice to be able to head to the National Gallery of Art with your high school art class as a day trip. It did make all those knowledge competitions that schools like telling their students about that strongly advertised, as a major reward, that the top teams would go to *gasp* Washington DC! *ungasp* a wee bit silly.
Still, even adding in those school trips, I’ve only been to the museums and the like in DC, what, less than ten times? And that’s with living 20 miles away for nearly two decades. It’s really not that special to me, thanks to being too irritating to get to. And yet, I still head there every five years or so, just to see what I can see. I’ve been thinking I should visit the United States Botanic Garden to see (and photograph) their plants…
