History Lessons and chicken

There has been a lot happening in the last week or so here - and, inevitably, the blog has suffered as a result. It is like an (un)virtuous circle - the more you do, the less time you have to blog, but the more you have to write about, and so the further you fall behind.

Washington and Philadelphia are but distant memories now, but I need to cover them off; if only for my own piece of mind. The thought of missing cities out entirely keeps me up at night. As a reader though, you might benefit from my slacking, because the number of irrelevant details that I can remember shrinks with each passing day, hopefully making for a more concise, but still entertaining blog.

We couldn't do the USA without visiting the nation's Capital, Washington, D.C., a city that seems to be almost entirely composed of monuments, museums and municipal buildings. We had two days in Washington, and divided them up in what I would guess to be the same way as almost every other tourist that visits this city. One day for the Smithsonians, one day for the monuments and famous buildings.

Before we had even started the tourist itinerary we realized that we were being joined in Washington by some sort of national boy scout gathering. Everywhere we looked were groups of 10 year old boys wearing khaki uniforms with badges and designations like 'Wisconsin 5th division', all being followed around by exhausted looking parents.

The Smithsonian is not one museum but rather a whole suburb of them. You can choose between modern and classical art, air and space, natural history, American history, sculpture and more. Kate's tastes in museums - planes, spaceships and dinosaurs - coincides just about with that of every 10 year old boy, so we shared our visit to these museums with what seemed to be half the prepubescent population of the United States. The other half apparently weren't allowed to choose their museum, and were waiting for us in the American History Museum.

There are some great exhibitions - the Wright Brothers plane is a favourite, while the space exhibit kept me entertained with mind boggling questions about the age of the universe, and the inevitable question of what there was before that. American History has an entire floor devoted to America's wars, which can't help but give the impression that they really don't mind a scrap over here, but don't spend an excessive amount of time contemplating the rights and wrongs of their decisions in retrospect - a great deal more floor space was devoted to the repressive English of the 1770s than the unfortunate South East Asians of the 1970s. The exhibitions on slavery and civil rights were much better, with a great mix of information and remembrance.

To see the monuments the next day we took a bike tour - a wise decision, because, as quickly become clear, there is an astonishing amount of space in Washington devoted to monuments and memorials. The centrepiece is the Washington Monument, the giant obelisk we've all seen on TV a thousand times. The National Mall stretches for out for a mile either side of the Washington, with the Capitol at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. Forming a cross with these points are the White House and the Jefferson Memorial, which was placed so that it is precisely in view from the White House, so that the President may look out of his window and draw inspiration from the third President, and the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Franklin Roosevelt has also qualified for a monument, sitting just off the National Mall, in view of Lincoln.

Then there are the War Memorials - one for each foreign war the USA has been involved in. The Korean War memorial contains 19 larger than life steel soldiers, prowling through scrubs and bushes. When reflected in the adjoining wall there are 38 figures, representing the 38th parallel, where the border was eventually drawn. Vietnam takes a subtler approach, with the names of all 58 000 soldiers killed in the war inscribed in reflective granite blocks; reflective so that you can see yourself amongst the casualties. An interesting sight here is the people who come with a pencil and a piece of paper and take a rubbing image of a name they find on the memorial.

The other interesting fact we learned about the Vietnam memorial was that it was designed by a 21 year old architecture student, who won a national contest. The conditions of the contest said that the design could not make any political statement about the war. It is a simple wall, with the dead listed in chronological order, starting in the middle, going out to the right, then continuing on the far left of the wall back to the middle, so the last casualty is just before the first one. It was only after it was built that someone noticed that it looked suspiciously like there were 58 000 names on the board leading you right back to where you started.

In case we hadn't had enough history (can you ever have enough history? Kate certainly thinks so), we headed to Philadelphia next, where quite a lot of important stuff happened in the 1770s. Philadelphia was briefly the capital of the United States, and it was here that the Declaration of Independence was written and proclaimed, and the constitution was framed. The old part of the city, where the founding fathers met and worked, makes up the Independence National Park, which was worth a visit too.

Philadelphia was, in a sense, where it all went wrong for the British back then, and, 220 years later, it wasn't all good for a couple of antipodeans either. The sightseeing was great, but a few hours after eating in what seemed like a cute old tavern, the buffalo wings we had shared returned with their very own quest for freedom from the oppressive yoke of our stomachs, and apparently unwilling to follow the usual peaceful path to such liberty.

Things were complicated the next day by the fact that we had a hotel reservation in New York to get to, so we tried to brave it out in the car. This was not an excellent time to hit the first serious traffic of our journey. From Philadelphia through New Jersey to Manhattan is basically one urban megapolis, and the highways look just as you would expect - crawling at a snail's pace. There were pros and cons about this. A pro was that, when you pull over to throw up, you barely lose your spot in the queue. A con was that, as the traffic is not moving, instead of hundreds of motorists catching a fleeting glance of someone hunched over by the road, a select group of five or six cars gets the opportunity to carry out an in-depth analysis of your last couple of meals.

Reprising this memory is making me feel queasy all over again, so I will leave it there for now. We've only a week or so left, and I have plenty that I still wanted to get into this blog, so I'll try and post a couple of pieces in the next few days.