The sights!

I've been downtown more times this week than I care to count and my feet are KILLING me. I actually just turned down the chance to go to the capital to see Ted Kennedy's motorcade because I'm having issues standing for more than 15 minutes at a time.

But!! I have pictures from the past week. Get ready for a picture-palooza.

On Tuesday, Jessie decided she wanted to see the sights at night because she'd heard everything was lit up and gorgeous. Okay. So at 8pm a bunch of us climbed onto the metro and spent the next four hours wandering around and exploring.

The World War II Memorial with the Washington Monument in the background. El Mon has two red lights at the top which blink at night - makes it look like it has angry eyes.
This is basically the coolest picture ever. Washington Monument from the Lincoln Memorial.
It really was cooler at night.
The White House at night - unoccupied, sadly, because the Obamas are in Martha's Vineyard.

Wednesday was my first seminar class, and I really like my professor. The general set-up is that we'll have readings over the weekend, then a seminar on Wednesday morning to talk about the reading and the week to come. Then, Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon, and Friday morning we'll go places and/or have speakers, etc. Friday afternoon we have a final seminar to debrief. It's a good setup.

Mondays and Tuesdays are reserved for internships. I've interviewed at a couple of places and been offered one position. I'm debating taking it, but I don't want to commit until I hear from another place. It's kind of complicated.

Anyhow, on Thursday we got to tour the Capitol, which was awesome. So many statues! So many important rooms! So much history! It was fabulous. Then we got to "tour" the White House, which was kind of lame, because we only got to see a few of the upstairs parlour rooms that were used in the 1800s. No Oval Office, no West Wing, nothing cool. We were in line for security longer than we were actually in the building. But all was not lost. We chatted up some cute secret service guys and spotted a window with butterfly stickers - Sasha or Malia's room, perhaps?

On Friday we planned to take a walking tour of the mall, but we were rained out early. It ended up working out well, though. We started off with the things I hadn't seen, then by the time the rain hit, we were going to see Lincoln, WWII, Vietnam, and Korean memorials. I saw all of those on Tuesday, so I didn't feel like I missed anything.

Here's Jefferson's memorial from across the river. It looked like something out of Star Wars. Anyone?

A waterfall from Roosevelt's memorial.
The leaves were just starting to change. I'm so excited for autumn!
The geese were at least enjoying the rain, because they could eat all the worms outside the Washington Monument.

Now I have a ton of reading to do. I need to take advantage of having the room to myself for the afternoon!