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DC Megathread

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---
title: "DC Megathread"
date: 2022-08-08T20:13:52-05:00
description: "All the weird things I saw in Washington DC, too long for a fediverse megathread"
type: "post"
tags: ["life", "vacation", "weird", "usa"]
---
*And now for something completely different...*
Over the past four days, from August 6 to 9, I've been blasted with a boatload of more weird stuff than I've seen in weeks. [smolshep](https://social.exozy.me/@smolshep), me, and another person-who-must-not-be-named spent those days on vacation in Washington DC, and yeah, things are quite weirder there than our hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.
## Day 0
Our trip began at the St. Louis International Airport (the "International" is a relic from a happier time when St. Louis was actually important and not the misery that it is today), which had long lines snaking inside near the entrance because it was so crowded. Based on the number of people not wearing masks, it was probably a superspreading event, except COVID-19 supposedly doesn't exist anymore according to the average person's behavior.
The flight was mediocre, which is a good thing when it comes to flights, except for that fact that they didn't have any apple juice left for in-flight refreshments so I had to settle for the vile liquid that is cranberry juice.
Our flight landed and smolshep started making conspiracy theories about who was related to who in what way while looking at the other families at the baggage claim. Also, some business-looking guy charged out of the plane ASAP once we landed, except we saw him waiting at the baggage claim, so maybe he just really didn't like being in planes? Fortunately our bag had successfully teleported to DC, so we got in a taxi to our hotel, and a minor controversy happened at the hotel as for whether or not the taxi driver had automatically given himself and expensive tip or not. The taxi driver also told us that three people had died of lightning at the Capitol the day before, which I haven't fact-checked so take it with a humongous grain of salt.
The person-who-must-not-be-named asked for a "quiet room" so we conveniently got a loud room next to the elevator, which always happens due to karma.
We were all pretty hungry at this point, so we collectively decided not to go to an [impossibly expensive sushi restaurant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi_Nakazawa) or the [Sushi Yaoi, err, I meant Aoi restaurant](http://www.thesushiaoi.com), so we went to a noodles restaurant next door to Sushi Aoi, which must be pretty bad for business. (I can never spell resturaunt.) At that restaurant, we noticed the first example of what I like to call the DC restaurant effect: when we first went inside, there were basically zero customers, but as we ate, a ton of people showed up. Maybe it's because St. Louis is one hour ahead of DC so we were all jetlagged?
While we were walking to the restaurant, we saw a girl with a nice hat (according to smolshep, I think all hats look the same). At the restaurant, I told smolshep that the girl sitting at another table looked awfully similar to the one wearing the hat, except that she had now taken off the hat, to which smolshep replied that that girl in the restaurant couldn't possibly be the one from earlier with the hat, which caused me to be awfully confused since I thought smolshep actually knew what they were talking about, but they were also awfully confused so we just sat there awfully confused eating spicy rice noodles until I finally realized that the girl in the restaurant was precisely the one that had been wearing a hat earlier, and thus ended an awfully confusing runon sentence.
And finally for my favorite weird thing from the whole trip:
![Squirrel assault](https://cloud.exozy.me/s/CdaHAGPBwaErkED/download/VID_20220806_192547.mp4)
On the way back, we stopped by the White House, or as close as possible that we could get to the White House, and there was a huge assortment of various protesters. Some of them sang the Ukrainian national anthem. Some of them held up signs saying "disband NATO". Some of them were actually confused tourists interspaced among the protesters. There was a guy pretending to do archery towards the White House. There was a dude who kept on yelling about Jesus and sounded like he was doing slam poetry. Anyways, it was hella chaotic so we went back to our hotel and I failed to fall asleep as usual for a while.
## Day 1
The next day started off with a visit to the other side of the White House and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which was pretty mediocre, which is really bad for a museum. Along the way we saw a guy playing basketball with a trash can, except he was terrible at basketball and kept on missing. We also heard these little kids with absolutely amazing British accents in front of the other side of the White House. That view of the White House was super anticlimatic though, since it was much farther away than the view we got yesterday, and there weren't any protesters. Anyways, we went to the museum afterwards, then left the museum at noon to go get some food.
Pi Pizzeria is a pizza place in St. Louis that I've never been to, shockingly. It has a DC location along with its three locations in St. Louis (and apparently one in Iraq!!!). We got some pizza at the DC location, and I'm now pretty glad I've never been to Pi Pizza in St. Louis, because it's also pretty mediocre. Their menu even had a lot of St. Louis-themed stuff, and there was some St. Louis memorabilia on the walls. Mediocre restraurant though. (The best pizza I've had recently was at the Wild West Pizzeria in West Yellowstone, Montana back in June, located across from the frightening "Big Gun Fun" shooting range (typical Montana), but that's a totally different story that would take forever to tell.)
After that, we walked around the DC Chinatown, where very few Chinese or Asian people now live since it's probably simultaneously super expensive from being near the National Mall and super run-down.
We saw a guy biking on one wheel in the middle of the road, which was both extremely dangerous and extremely cool, and two people breaking up, which was extremely intense so we tried to ignore them while walking by.
And then some random guy completely out the blue asked us, "Are you from Japan?", so smolshep replied "No" truthfully, and then the guy said "Goood". Weird stuff.
I've been to DC before four years ago, and I got gelato at an overpriced gelato store during that visit, so I made sure to point that out when we walked by the store this time so we wouldn't repeat the same mistake. I also had a huge overwhelming amount of deja vu when I saw a Tesla store that I have memories about from my previous trip, since one of of the other people I was walking with during that previous trip suggested breaking into the Tesla store and stealing the demo car...
We then went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where there was an interesting exhibit about Watergate presented through artworks.
## Day 2
smolshep's watch alarm went off at 2:00 (24-hour time), so everyone woke up thinking it was a new day, which it was, but walking around DC at 2:00 is too weird for this post, so we didn't do that.
We had tickets to go to the top of the Washington Monument, everyone's favorite imitation Egyptian architecture monolith obelisk, so we ate breakfast first and walked to the Washington Monument. Unfortunately, even with all the mishaps that happened before and after breakfast (when we rode the hotel elevator down to the lobby for breakfast, the elevator stupidly went *up* 6 floors first, and when smolshep rode the elevator back up to our room, they stupidly went up 3 extra floors and couldn't get into our room), we still arrived 45 minutes early to our ticket time and had to wait stupidly at the base, and somehow nearly missed the ride to the top since we were too busy waiting. I was disappointed that there's an elevator instead of hundreds of stairs which would have been so much more interesting, but the view at the top was nice! Also, the windows are tiny, but at the top you can see the red lights on the monument to tell planes at night not to crash into it.
We saw some official-looking signs warning people that bottled water sold in the National Mall was probably just random bottles that the vendors filled up at the fountains and resold, so we avoided the vendors after that.
We then visited the usual memorials in the National Mall, so I won't bore you with those details (actually interesting detail: the World War II memorial lists the Phillipines as a US territory), but we saw a ton of people filming a new Netflix movie at the Lincoln Memorial, so we had to wait a while to go inside. The actors were all dressed in 1920s clothes, and supposedly the movie includes some famous actors, but no one recognized any of them (especially me). There were also aggressive squirrels being fed by naive tourists.
Next up: the Einstein memorial, which includes a bunch of dots at the base of the memorial, which we thought were vandalism or bird poop or dirt or something, but it's actually a map of the night sky! Since it was around lunch time, we searched for the nearest restaurant, which happened to be a Subway inside the State Department, except we couldn't go inside and eat there for obvious reasons, sadly.
Later that day we went to the National Museum of Asian Art and the Smithsonian Castle, which had an exhibit about the Smithsonian Castle which was quite meta.
smolshep's feet died so we had to take a long rest inside the Smithsonian Castle before making the one-mile trek back to the hotel.
We bought dinner and some groceries at a Whole Foods, except the cashier forgot to put one of our items (a smoothie) in the grocery bag, so luckily the person-who-must-not-be-named stupidly forgot to buy something and ran back in, so we waited at the entrance and the cashier found us and gave us the item.
## Day 3
The last day started with a visit to the Capitol building, where we supposedly had a reservation for a tour except that the congressional staff member that we had reserved the tour with had changed jobs, so at the last minute an intern came instead to give us the tour. There were some police officers with extremely huge guns at the Capitol, which made sense.
That afternoon we rode an Uber to the DC Chinatown to ironically eat at a Japanese restaurant, except the Uber driver kept on getting distracted by their phone and missing green lights. We got to the restaurant, except oops! It was closed and only had takeout available. So, we found another Japanese restaurant nearby, which was also closed and only had takeout available. We also saw two women arguing on the street with a lot of curse words and another woman who was carrying a gun, so we hastily got out of the area and found a completely different restaurant to eat at.
After lunch we went back to the hotel, checked out, and got to the airport, where we bought some sandwiches, but the sandwich store at the airport was designed weirdly, where you first submitted your order on a touchscreen monitor, then waited for the staff to make your order and for them to call your order number. I didn't here them call my order number, so I waited for at least 10 minutes before realizing my stupidity.
Our flight back was also unnoteworthy, except that the plane couldn't take off for 20 minutes due to some bad paperwork, so that delayed our already-somewhat-delayed flight.
Once we got back to St. Louis, smolshep and I made some stupid conspiracy theories about how you can walk into exits by moonwalking to bypass security. I'd like to see someone try that at an airport...