Intern sees famous cherry blossoms during festival
It hardly seems real that what seemed like a short time ago I was driving from Indiana to Washington D.C. in an ice storm. Now, I have one month left. Already I can see how my experiences have changed me, and I really believe they have. One example of this change: I keep forgetting to indent paragraphs, forgetting this is not a press release.
The famous cherry blossoms are officially here and so are the politicians. Hillary, Obama and McCain are all supposed to be in town to hear General David Petraeus and Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before different committees.
Politicans aren’t the only ones in town, tourists turned out too to see the blossoms. The tidal basin between the Jefferson Memorial and the mall looks like pink cotton candy is covering the trees. Some of the delicate pink leaves fall into the water, making spots of pink on the usually blue surface.
On Sunday night my friend and I went to see fireworks in honor of the Cherry Blossom Festival. The fireworks on the Southwest waterfront were lively, the army band was playing pop music like Barracuda, but the area from the waterfront to the metro was at best sketchy.
Neither my friend nor I was too happy at the idea of walking back to the metro station in the dark through this neighborhood. So we ended up walking about a mile to the Jefferson Memorial to watch the fireworks.
To my surprise, around 300 people were sitting at the front of the monument.
Wait, I thought, aren’t they facing the wrong way? But surely 300 people can’t all be sitting in the wrong direction. Maybe they know something about the fireworks that I didn’t.
In the end, I was right, the fireworks were to the back of the memorial and I was the one person of 300 people who knew.
Everyone ended up stampeding to where my friend and I were sitting once they heard the fireworks and could not see them. While it was nice being the only person out of 300 who actually knew what they were doing, it was kind of scary too.
It wasn’t as if information on the fireworks was hard to come by, I guess it either shows the power of suggestion when one person sat down and everyone else followed or that no one bothers to do a little research.
Fireworks aside, in the past two weeks I have done and seen so much, packing in all I can. When my parents were here we went to Baltimore and Mt. Vernon. Anyone visiting the area should go to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, there were all kinds of neat fish, and you can go in the virtual theater and have water sprayed on you. This weekend, I went to the house where Lincoln died. Another fun fact, the owner of the house was upset that they carried Lincoln after he was shot to his home because people brought in mud from their shoes and ruined the towels with Lincoln’s blood. That is Washington D.C. hospitality for you.
