Sunday, February 12, 2012

A trip to Washington DC

In the beginning of 2012, I made a trip to the capital city of the United States of America, Washington DC. It was a trip that was planned long ahead and something I was looking forward to. I have read and seen so much about the place that, I had a whole list of things I wanted to see and do there. Given that my husband's business visit lasted only 3 days, I had to shorten my list of things to do.

The two most important things that contributed to my knowledge on DC are, The Lost Symbol a novel by Dan Brown and Food Network, thanks to all their shows from Top Chef to Food wars, I knew a lot many places to eat. Given the fact that I have not visited my own country's capital, Delhi, seeing Washington DC was a distant dream. So I was so excited to be there. My husband had booked us a hotel as close to the places of interest as possible. We walked to most of them that we could visit.

First things first, I saw snow, it was falling quietly outside our window painting the city white. It was simply beautiful. The place was cold, for a person from Florida, it was too cold. But I liked the change.

We walked our way to the first place on the list, White House. We walked up the road and there it was, right there! We were looking at it from the street. I was surprised to see it, I was expecting something in the center of a large area, though it was pretty large area, it still did not account for how large I imagined it to be.

The next stop from the White House was the Washington Monument. A large structure, which is an obelisk that was built to commemorate the first U.S. president, General George Washington. It was all that I expected it to look like. I had read about it in the Lost Symbol and had seen it in the news after the earthquake. Unfortunately, it was closed for visitors, so we had to see it from outside only.

Across from this monument, was the WWII memorial and Lincoln memorial. One of our friends who lived there said the WWII memorial was a very peaceful place to spend time. The Lincoln memorial left me dumbstruck. It was this huge marble structure, with huge solid marble Pillars. It was one of the largest structures I had ever seen. The largest structure list consists of : The Nandi at Nandi Hills, The Thanjore Temple, Temple at Rameswaram and The Capitol at Austin(I think most capitol buildings are huge)..there might be more to this list, but these were the first that come to my mind.

We also got a quick tour of the George Washington University. The Potomac river that runs between Washington DC and Virginia physically separates the two places, I mean if you crossed a bridge you were in Virginia, I found this interesting. Now I understand what, one of my friends meant by "I live outside DC, not in DC but in Virginia".

DC is a foodie's dream come true. One could find so many restaurants, serving so many different cuisines. The best of this was the food trucks. They appear during the day suddenly and serve tasty and affordable food. Its like food comes knocking at your office door. Yummy.

With that delicious thought, I want to complete this post as I can go on rambling about all the other places and food, but this was a quick round up of the things that interested me the most in DC.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Year 2011

Phew! I made it to the blog on the last day of the year. I did not want this year to go by without making a post on my blog.
It was a wonderful year, 2011. There were many nice things that have happened this year. It was one of the fastest years to go by. Hoping 2012 will be a nice year too.
Happy new year everyone.Hope everyone has a happy, healthy and a prosperous new year.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

No Mention

Was reading this old post on my reader : POST(yes I have a month long backlog in reading). It was interesting how things happening in politics are so similar irrespective of the state, language and people. People are not sensitive about small things, its only the other major forces in our society that make it an issue. Its the same with religious sentiments. These are played a lot more in our country. I have seen some problems myself where in the average person would not feel too bad about it, like the simple issue of releasing The Da Vinci Code movie in Chennai. Many groups brought about a ban on it, I was amused by this cause, if they had extreme faith, even after watching that movie they should not be moved or change. Its just a work of fiction, on the other hand they banned it and made it look like they had a fickle faith.My friends who were Christians, felt that this action of banning the film was unwanted and silly. There was this other movie Anbe Sivam, in which the hero says there is no god and plays opposite to a strong hindu theist and says a lot of stuff about god not existing blah blah, I watched that movie. I did not feel that my sentiments were hurt.Its a fiction , another person's opinion, just because I think something I can't make someone else think that way by forcing them.But that's exactly what is happening now, like that post says, someone was offended so expects everyone else to agree to it. Sad! The part of that post that I liked and always felt was, if someone says they are big people and awesome and all that the criticism of what they do by one person or a group of people should not affect them badly.

SAy NO to Reservation!