We’ve spent two full days walking the streets of Washington, D.C. and here are some observations:<\/p>\n
#1. The Library of Congress is a beautiful building<\/strong>, but it is very hard to find a book there. Apparently they are stored in other buildings. You tell them what book you want, and some magic wizard delivers your book 20 minutes later. But it’s not like getting lost in the book stacks at Mizzou. The building itself is quite gorgeous, worth the tour in terms of art and architecture. It’s also cool to see in person, the exact stuff we saw when we watched National Treasure last week.<\/p>\n #2. The Supreme Court is more informal than I would have expected<\/strong>. I’d never been to the Court before. It really wasn’t alot different than what happens at your local county courthouse. It was cool to see the people you only see on TV. There they sat. All nine of them, kind of looking bored. We heard argument on a case involving whether prosecutors can be sued when they’ve manufactured evidence on innocent defendants. (Seems pretty common sensical to me…..)<\/p>\n #3. Your legs hurt when you tour Washington<\/strong>. We’ve walked, and walked, and walked.<\/p>\n #4. People are nice here<\/strong>. We’ve met alot of very helpful people in the hotels, on the streets, everywhere……..<\/p>\n #5. The Capitol isn’t as grand as I remembered<\/strong>. It’s quite beautiful on the outside, but inside it’s kind of a highly-polished, slightly dirty, old building. Neat statuary. Cool to stand back and watch so many of the people you see on the nightly news walk by. But not near as grand today as it was when I was a teen-ager.<\/p>\n #6. Senators behave like kids<\/strong>. We toured the old Senate chamber. A really classy, elegant old room. Why don’t they use it anymore? Because as the country grew, the number of members in the House of Representatives grew and the House had to have a larger chamber. So……the Senate got a new chamber, too.<\/p>\n #7. Your elected officials are available<\/strong>. They were everywhere, and talking to whoever wanted to talk. I spent more time with my Congressman the third time I ran into him. He actually escorted us out of the building, through the steam tunnels and pointed us toward the restaurant he recommended. He listened to my concerns and told me where he stood.<\/p>\n #8. Congressional offices aren’t terribly fancy<\/strong>. On TV the swaggering Congressman always has a really luxurious office. In reality, it’s just an office. I’ve had alot fancier offices than my Congressman has.<\/p>\n #9. The swarm of people following important folks isn’t what you’d think<\/strong>. I stood 10 feet from the German Foreign Minister. \u00a0A cadre of security and news media were all over him. Speaker Pelosi walked through the hall today with only a couple of aids and nobody even spoke to her. Kind of seemed backward. I asked some of the folks traveling with the German guy why he was here and what he was saying. They said “He’s the Foreign Minister. Traveling and making speeches is what he does. ” Oh! Silly me. Of course.<\/p>\n That’s today’s report. Perhaps more later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’ve spent two full days walking the streets of Washington, D.C. and here are some observations: #1. The Library of Congress is a beautiful building, but it is very hard to find a book there. Apparently they are stored in other buildings. You tell them what book you want, and some magic wizard delivers your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":503,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}