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| Monday, November 15, 2004 09:44 PM |
| The Honeymoon Post (without the naughty bits) |
 by Fëanor |
Okay, time to catch up on all that posting I haven't been doing. Settle in, folks.
First of all, the wedding. We'd been planning to get married for some time, and had considered doing it in complete secrecy and telling everybody afterwards, since neither of us wanted a lot of fuss and fanciness, but ultimately we decided to invite a few of our closest relatives. Then we just went down to the Camden City Hall early one morning and got it all done. Afterwards, we had breakfast at a diner, just like the trashy Jersey folks we are. :) But really, it was very nice and casual and fun and everybody had a good time, and I think it was really a good way to handle the whole thing.
And then it was off to D.C., which is a pretty cool city, and pretty easy to get to. It's not really too far away from the Jersey/Philly area, and the drive isn't too bad, so probably we'll go back one of these days and get to some of the stuff we missed.
Once you get to D.C., however, it's a different matter. The layout of the streets seems to have started off as a grid, but then a madman snuck in and hacked savage diagonal slashes into the city plans, and then drew a circle every place a diagonal intersected a straight line. To put it another way, don't try to drive in D.C. It's totally insane. Streets go from being two way to one way, but then sometimes they're only one way for a few hours (I'm not even kidding), and then suddenly you're in a circle--a circle of hell! I've hated circles since my Mom and I had some bad experiences with roundabouts in England. A local Brit tried to tell us they were a great invention, and that they keep traffic flowing. We smiled and nodded and later agreed he was crazy. Yeah, they keep traffic flowing, all right--to hell! They're discs of confusion and horror and near-death!
But anyway. If you're walking on the streets of D.C. rather than driving, they can still be a bit confusing, but with a good, expensive map like the one we had, and a smart wife like the one I have, it's pretty easy to get around. Plus, deep under its streets, D.C. hides the greatest public transportation system I have ever experienced--the Metro. The Metro truly rocks. It is totally easy to navigate, it has a relatively inexpensive and really flexible fare system, and the trains come quite often and take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. And everything tends to be relatively clean, too. The folks at SEPTA and PATCO should head down there and take a look around and see what they can learn.
While in D.C., we stayed at a nice little Holiday Inn near the White House (which we never visited, btw; we might have gotten enraged at the sight of the place, tried to attack it headlong, and gotten arrested, and that's not a fun way to spend your honeymoon). It's always cool to stay at a hotel, and make a big mess and have somebody else clean it up for you. Plus, we got a good deal that included breakfast free every day. You could order from the menu or go up to the buffet, but we went with the buffet every time, because buffets are awesome. Seriously--I rediscovered my love of the buffet. How awesome is it to just pay a flat and rather small fee and then walk up to a huge table full of all kinds of foods and take a little bit of everything you like until you can't eat anymore? It rocks. Of course, the food isn't always of the highest quality, but whatever.
The hotel also had a button on the phone for ordering pizza. We never actually used it, but...dude. A pizza button on the phone.
The hotel wasn't perfect, though. The parking was ridiculous, for instance. We went around the place once trying to figure out where it was, and finally I had to stop out front and have poppy go in and figure it out. Turns out you have to check in first, leaving your car in front of the door while you do it, and then you can go park. With a map and directions we still missed the tiny narrow alley leading back to the parking garage and had to back up. The alley was for entering and exiting the area behind the hotel, despite the fact that it was hardly wide enough to fit one car at a time. And the garage itself was even worse--extremely narrow and dangerous, with strange twists and turns, and only rounded mirrors to tell you if anybody is coming around the next corner.
And then there was the internet. There were computers in the lobby with which we thought we might blog a bit, but after buying ten minutes of time on one and wasting about seven of those minutes just waiting for a couple pages to load, we gave up.
So, what did we see in D.C.? Well, not as much as we'd planned. We didn't, for instance, tour the monuments or the Smithsonian. I've seen them before, though--and the Smithsonian quite recently--so no biggie. We wanted to take it easy on our honeymoon, anyway, and then on Friday it rained all day and we really didn't feel like doing much. We ate a lot, though. On the first day, we discovered an awesome little Thai place right near the hotel called Bua Thai. Everything we tried was excellent. Each bite simultaneously thrilled and saddened me--thrilled, because it was so good, and saddened, because it was so far away from home. There are no good Thai places near Haddonfield that we have discovered.
As you'll see from my pictures, we checked out the National Gallery of Art, both East and West wings. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take pictures inside of any of the museums, so I didn't, but we did actually go in them. The West wing of the National Gallery is the older, more classical part of the museum, and the East wing is the modern. I think we both tend to like modern art more, so we hit the East wing first and spent most of our time there. Then we checked out a couple of rooms in the West wing.
Other museums we visited: The National Museum of the American Indian (which I really want to call the National Museum of the Native American, but whatever), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the International Spy Museum (everything's either "national" or "international" in D.C.). The NMAI was a really cool looking building, but inside it was packed with people and kind of disappointing. Only the third and fourth floors seemed to have anything on them; the first and second were pretty much just gift shops and such. The NMWA was pretty cool, with a few older paintings, some Native American pottery, and then a lot of contemporary stuff.
The ISM, which was one of the first museums we visited, was kind of lame. It had sounded cool, so I'd been pretty excited to check it out, but when we got there we found ourselves sandwiched by a bus-load of old folks and a bus-load of highschoolers (two of poppy's favorite groups of people), and then we were herded into one room after another and subjected to lame preparatory exercises and videos. When we were finally let loose among exhibits, poppy went ahead a bit to escape our co-visitors, while I lingered behind and tried to get the most out of the place.
And to be fair there was some pretty cool stuff there. I was amazed at how many of the gadgets I'd seen in James Bond movies--especially the ones that seemed the most ridiculous and unbelievable--actually existed and were used by real spies. There were cars decked out with oil slicks and gun turrets; guns hidden in umbrellas and even cigarettes; knives hidden up sleeves; cameras disguised in watches and coats. It's some pretty amazing stuff.
Pretty much the only other thing we did in D.C. (besides some other stuff I'm not going to tell you about--see the title of this post) was go see a Shakespeare play--Two Gentlemen of Verona. I enjoyed it more than poppy, I think, but we both had a good time. The play was an early comedy by the bard that neither of us had read before. It's not one of his best--the ending in particular is even more of a deus ex machina than usual--but it's still a Shakespeare play. Even his lousy plays are pretty awesome. And the production was really quite excellent. The actors were really good, at both the drama and the comedy, the verbal and the physical acting, and the set and costume design was really interesting. There was a limited number of actors playing a lot of parts, which meant a bunch of women were going around in old man masks, and that was an interesting twist. The theater had an Elizabethan look to it, and the set was minimal but stylish and effective, with four windows at the top with different images on them, and an upper stage with stairs and a pole leading down to the lower stage.
Anyway, I see that the post has gotten quite long, so I'll finish here. In summary, we had a great time, and I couldn't have married a better gal. :) |
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