Day 2: The Cold

This should be interesting. I mean it’s fricking cold. I mean February northern New Hampshire cold, cold as a witch’s teat, cold enough that gasoline freezes, cold enough, well you know where I’m going fellas.

There are people coming from all over the known world. We met a woman from LA today, where it was 87 degrees. People aren’t used to this. Like I said yesterday, people here dress to look good. You see the certain crazies, people running, and of course people who ride bikes, but they actually appear to prepared for the weather, along with the bicycle rickshaws.

It struck me as obvious things often do, to look at the poverty around the opulence here in DC. The wealth in DC is concentrated in Northwest, the Capitol area and then through Georgetown on up. Seeing the homeless and beggars within the shadow of the White House and the other circles of power is quite striking. This is nothing new of course, but it made me wonder of other national capitals and whether the contrast is as amazing.

The sign of three homeless folks, waving happily at my daughter was incredible, people who have nothing, having a nice moment with my little girl. Sigh, ok time to put my head back into the sand for a while.

MASS TRANSIT

“Public transportation is for losers” Homer Simpson

I’m not sure that public transit will ever work in this country. First, we are all too fat, lazy and uncooperative. If we have to do anything at all that will inconvenience us then we just don’t want do it. It’s hard to tell a date, “yo, meet me down at the bus stop, I’ll be moving by on the 106, just check the schedule.” And often frankly, it’s just not convenient or doesn’t go where we want to go.

The other issue is that it is sometimes just so nonnegotiable unless you grew up with it. If you have never taken buses in a city for example, you have no idea where they go. Before the Internet you needed the Rosetta Stone of buses, that being a 47 year old woman who grew up in Somerville to figure out how to get anywhere. You could sit on the side of Mass. Ave and chronicle the goings on, write your anthropological master’s thesis and still have no idea what’s happening. Or you learn the essential buses, which doesn’t help if someday you need to do something you ordinarily don’t do. You know an MRI or something, because the best time to figure out how to get to Beth Israel is when you’ve torn your ACL and there is three inches of ice out.

The Internet has made it somewhat easier with rider tools and whatnot but that 47 year old woman is still going to tell you “that’s retarded” because she knows the bus driver from the 62 bus is hooking up with a girl from the Newtowne Grill and always takes his time on that route.

So that’s what I’m trying to say, there is absolutely no consistency even within one city when it comes to public transportation. Washington, DC who has exactly 892 people who actually were born and have lived in the District all their lives and actually leave their own neighborhoods is a prime example. The major issue is, I don’t know that 47 year old woman from Southeast who help me out and lets just say that as a government employee I know that the worst gov’t employees go to work for transit. Why? Because it’s one of the few places left where you’re uncle’s friend’s city councilman can still hook you up. If you are in the capital of the free world you should be able to explain how the system works, but mostly it’s not their fault. They just keep building stuff on top of itself, there are like 12 different types of machines with the same functions, to sell you a card so you can take various type of transport. And God forbid you rip a flimsy little card, because you’re going to take half a day to fix it and we’re only going to have one teller on the biggest weekend ever. OK so between my wife and I’s multiple advanced degrees we eventually figured it out but still I have two different cards, because God forbid you could transfer the huge sum of 17 dollars to a new card.

So my answer is standardization. Like EZ pass or whatever. Use the same damn system across the country. You take federal dollars you use the same system taking people’s money. You use the same way of communicating how the hell you get somewhere. You don’t need NASA to help you to put up a sign telling what bus that 90% of the people want to go on goes to and where it picks up. The thing is with transit is that it is extremely expensive, fares cover only a small piece of the pie, you gotta fill those trains and buses to make it worthwhile.

That being said the Metro for all of it’s typical Washington area “flavor”, that being boring, sterile and confusing is very clean and efficient. The no food thing could be annoying on a regular basis, but damn compared to Boston it’s like being on a Finnish airliner. And they make up with bus service to where people want to go at the cheapest prices. The circulator was great, no thinking to it the perfect tourist bus. Once of course you consulted the Oracle to find out where it went.

Smithsonian History Museum

There is no better gift to the nerdy American public than the Smithsonian. OK, so you rook my wallet for the Farm Bill, knock some of my bucks away to fake a moon landing and give out some nice corporate welfare to some fatcats, but I can see the Hope Diamond for free so let’s call it even.

The history museum was closed for about two years. I can’t really tell the changes but I do love this place. So much cool stuff. If I was an eccentric Bond billionaire it’s the type of crap I’d have in my carved out volcano. They do a good job in kind of finding regular people and put them into the entire historical picture. You know the kind of thing that pisses some people off, the kind of people who think that Napoleon conquered half of Europe by himself with only the assistance of a well trained horse and a flintlock pistol.

Elena really liked the trains, maybe because she has been on some type of public transport for most of the last 30 hours, for some reasons I don’t think toddlers understand the significance of Lincoln’s signed documents.

At first, there didn’t seem to be that many people in DC. Maybe people were just showing up, maybe people thought it was too cold, who knows. We managed to get to MetroCenter, consult with the Oracle of the Metro and get our SmartPasses, although at first she would only let me buy one. I asked her if my wife and I had to make separate purchases and eventually she let me slide. I’m thinking that she may have actually been holding people up in getting to spend money in the city.

There was a guy who was dressed as Lincoln, a dead ringer and a guy dressed as Jefferson and as Washington. I was looking for the guy dressed as Andrew Johnson. How cool it would be to be an Andrew Johnson recreator. I also voted for him in the survey as best president ever. Why? Because it was a stupid survey, a survey of people dorky enough to stop and answer an electronic survey of best presidents ever.

The crowds started getting larger. A lot of youth and their chaperones, chaperoning has got to be one of the most thankless jobs ever. I would say it is the equivalent of working in a chicken factory, everyone loves chicken but nobody wants to process them for 10 hours a day. We had a thirty dollar lunch that likely had the markup of Peruvian cocaine, I have no idea why everything in DC costs so much, particularly food, food seems to be about 1 and half times the amount of any in Boston, which is an expensive city in itself.

A good history trip though. Stuff about Jewish immigration to Cincinnati that seemed kind of random that I’m excited to tell my friend Josh about. Also a gorgeous Indian motorcycle and an M-1 carbine that I’d like to add to my Bond villain collection.

The Rest of the Day

We had planned on making our way to the Natural History museum but time was running short. Instead we walked up to the White House. On the way, I thought that we should try to have our pictures taken with random strangers from as many states as possible. When we got to the Second Division memorial we took our first one then realized that we didn’t have any paper to record who was who. So that’s a mission for the next few days.

The amazing thing about DC today compared to my youth is the level of security. While this weekend obviously has a heightened level, it still is amazing. It is difficult to walk in a straight direction to go anywhere and the presence of the various different public security forces is astounding. We made our way to the White House, which Elena has termed as “Obama’s House”, although she could have been talking about the Washington Monument actually, who knows. We’ll go with her bring precocious if not premature. Our bid to walk to the Lincoln Memorial at this point was brought back by the cold and the understanding that we were terrible parents for keeping our child out in bitter cold for hours at end. We made our way for another 20 minute walk to the Circulator or what I would like to call the best bus in the world outside of the bus that takes John Madden to football games.

The baby backpack is an amazing thing but damn are my shoulders hurting. After a little Elmo time, we got a chance to go out for some pizza and beers in Glover Park at Kavanaugh’s or what I would call Newtowne Grill at twice the price. Ah, it hit the spot though.

No Arlington today. And I didn’t here from my cousin. Maybe Monday. Tomorrow it may hit 40, maybe I’ll wear shorts. Initial pics are up at http://picasaweb.google.com/nyalfuentes/InaugurationPics#