England Exchange: June 30th: Natural History Museum, Jefferson Monument

Writing the entry very late, so I've forgotten what I did exactly.

I think I woke up and then wasn't very motivated to go and do things. It's very hot outside so when you go outside to walk to the museums it is very sweaty. Also, I've seen a lot of museums now and they start to become less exciting.

I probably hung out with some people from the hostel for a while in the morning. Then I walked over to the Natural History Museum.

A silly picture of me.

Some cool buildings.

On the way to the Natural History Museum I went into the National Portrait Gallery. Here they have lots of portraits of the American presidents, portraits of other people, and some landscape pictures. I liked the landscape pictures more. I think this is Yellowstone National Park. It looks really good. I'll have to go there.

I think this is in South America somewhere. It looks good. I'll have to go there.

This is called 'The Grand Painting' or something. It's a fictional painting about some stuff that could exist in the United States somewhere. It's fairly big and looks good.

I checked out the portraits of the American presidents for a while but they didn't interest me very much. They just seemed like portraits to me. I think I would find it more interesting to learn about what they each did. Although I found it a bit interesting to think that the physical material of the painting existed in front of those presidents as an artists was painting, possibly during some kind of important historical time.

I left the Portrait Gallery and then went over to the Natural History Museum.

Along the way I saw the FBI building. Here it is. This is where Fox Mulder did his stuff.

I got into the Natural History Museum and I read some stuff. I don't really understand these types of museums because the things that you see are usually artificial recreations of an animal or something with some brief explanation of what it is. I think they are supposed to inspire you to be interested in learning about these sorts of things by providing some access to the knowledge, but I think they have lost their value now that all this stuff can be found easily on the internet. But I gave it a shot and I found all this chemical/biological stuff to be fairly interesting and inspired me to want to know more. I saw some other cool things also.

This rock is 4600 million years old. I found that to be fairly amazing. Somewhere else I think I read that the oldest rocks on earth are 1600 million years old. I think it is a kind of strange and cool concept that somewhere other than earth there were rocks forming a lot earlier than they were on Earth.

They had a thing with butterflies inside.

Some scientists walking around on solidified lava.

There was an exhibit of photography from a competition. I think I was not allowed to take photos. The photos were amazing... There was one taken from underwater, with a wave breaking above, and a turtle swimming along with the wave.

I left the museum, went out onto the "mall" and found that they were playing some music out there. They have a lot of pavillions set up where they will play different styles of music through the week, I think. At this time they were playing stuff at the "motor city" one. I guess that's supposed to be Detroit. They were playing kind of soul/funk type stuff.

I still had a bit of sunlight and I'd wasted some of the morning so I decided to walk to the Jefferson Monument. This is a building along the way. Washington DC is filled with these kinds of government buildings.