Free time in D.C.

My business trip to the D.C. area last week went well, and it was great seeing several of my co-workers again. On my last day in town I took some time off to take in some sights, old and new.

First I went to Dupont Circle. As I came up the north metro entrance, I noticed that work was underway to inscribe a quotation into the circular wall surrounding the escalators. There were only two lines done at that point, but I thought, could it be Whitman? Sure enough, I looked it up online, and it’s an excerpt from “The Wound-Dresser”:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad

Ah, too bad the rest of the stanza won’t be included; it continues: “(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips).”

I hit a couple of Dupont haunts for old time’s sake: Kramer’s for breakfast (prosciutto benedict, yum), and then Lambda Rising to browse through the magazines and pick up a copy of the Blade and Metro Weekly. (One other thing that would’ve made it a total trip down memory lane is getting a mango lassi at Teaism, but I didn’t have time.)

For a new experience I decided to check out the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, which had been closed for renovations for several years and reopened just last year. There’s so much to see there, but a piece I especially liked is Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii. It’s a neon U.S. map with several monitors showing different images or video for each state.

Here’s a short video I whipped up in iMovie; I added some Sufjan Stevens to the still photos, and the second part has the actual audio from the art installation. It’s kind of muddled, but you can just make out Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice.

See also more photos, mostly from the museums.

When traveling, I try to eat at restaurants I wouldn’t find at home, like Maryland-based California Tortilla, which has great burritos, but ironically has nothing to do with California. I stopped in there at the beginning of the trip. And at the end, when I got to BWI and was looking for a place to have dinner before the plane ride home, I decided on Obrycki’s. (Apparently the main restaurant is in Baltimore proper, but there’s also this one at the airport.) I’d never heard of it before, but I figured I couldn’t come through Maryland without having some crab. Sitting at the bar (and feeling like an old travel pro), I had a beer and a crab cake sandwich. It was a nice and tasty end to the trip!