my D.C. trip

As promised, here’s how my trip to Washington, D.C. went. I went as part of a class I’m taking which is focused on developing leadership skills, and the idea of the trip was for us to meet with some of our nation’s leaders and find out what they do, what problems they face, etc. The whole trip was funded by a wealthy couple who donated a lot of money to the university, so while we would pay for things along the trip, we’re going to be reimbursed when we meet for class again this week.

We were to leave on Sunday, March 9 and return Wednesday, March 12 by plane, and that’s where the problems began. Turns out on Sunday that Cincinnati Airport wasn’t accepting incoming flights, so we had to drive up there in various cars. For some reason, we decided it was a good idea to take along a hitchhiker with his gigantic cello case, amongst speculation that he might be housing a dead body in there. Sure, he seemed like a mild-mannered Asian man who wasn’t too comfortable with English, but you never know.

So we made it to Cinci and discovered that most of our plane tickets for the connecting flight to D.C. were scheduled for the next day, while only a couple were for the correct time that day. Our chaperones stayed at the Delta counter for a good while, hashing things out and trying to cram every last one of us seventeen students onto a flight to D.C., because it was imperative to our schedule that we make it there that night, and not the next day. We all managed it, somehow, and the rest of the trip to D.C. went fine. It was my first flight and it really wasn’t bad; the only thing that surprised me was how noisy the plane was, what with the roar of the engines.

Our first night was occupied by getting passes for the Metro, traveling to our hotel, and having dinner. We ate dinner with a general and his wife, which was pretty cool because he was a wily old guy. I suspect he was vicariously trying to live through us young folks, though, when he told us not to sleep while in D.C., but rather to go out drinking; we could sleep when we were dead. Since our dinner was on the dean, the general also joked about a round of bourbon for all of us.

Dinner with everyone

The waitress at that first dinner was a hoot, too, though initially she was just annoying: she kept forgetting to bring me my drink. At first, she brought everyone else’s drink out to them and mine took maybe ten minutes more. It’s not like I ordered anything weird, either, just a Diet Coke. Then when I asked for a refill halfway through the meal, she took my glass and didn’t return with it for about fifteen to twenty minutes. I was pretty annoyed about this, especially when I saw her bringing beers to others quickly, but then I watched as Chandra asked for and got a refill of her Diet Coke almost immediately. Next time our waitress came by, I asked her again for my refill. She apologized a few times and disappeared. When I saw her coming back, I had to laugh: she’d brought an entire pitcher of Diet Coke with three straws in it. She plunked it down in front of me and everyone was goggling around, wondering what on earth I’d gotten a pitcher for. She did eventually bring me a glass, too, so I wouldn’t have to drink out of the pitcher. I’d almost finished it by the time we left that night.

I think I was the only person under 21 on the trip, so when the others would go out to bars, I got to sit back at the hotel. :( Even if I’d have been allowed into said bars, what fun would it be to sit around watching everyone get more and more drunk? My roommate Dominique was nice enough to stay with me that first night, though, and the other nights I found others to hang out with that weren’t interested in the bar scene.

When Dominique and I got back to the hotel, we relaxed a bit and then decided to go to bed, since we had an early morning next day. We were doing normal bathroom routines when Dominique just said my name. I looked ’round to see her looking pointedly at the bathroom wall. Turning back around, I saw a big ol’ cockroach sitting above a wall cabinet. Now, I expect to see roaches in $40/night hotels or rent-by-the-hour motels, but dang it, our group was paying over $300/night for those rooms. There aren’t supposed to be any roaches! I took my tennis shoe and squashed his little butt; I bet his body is still lying on top of that cabinet.

The next morning, we had our first briefing at the National Science Foundation. That really set the bar for the other briefings because the lady who presented to us was very informative, interesting, and she was [most importantly] able to answer our questions. That last bit turned out to be difficult for some groups… After our briefing, we had some free time in which we could wander around in groups. I went with some folks to a few Smithsonian museums, enjoying the Hope diamond and some Asian art.

At the National Museum of Natural History

Our next briefing was with the Department of Energy, and it was by far the worst of all our scheduled events in D.C. Let me just tick off the problems it had:

• The lady giving the presentation had only received it the Friday before (this was on Monday), and I don’t think she’d looked over it until that day because she read through the slides as she went. In fact, a lot of what she said was read directly from the slides.
• Some people don’t naturally have a good speaking voice, but this lady’s was ridiculous. She was sluggish and quiet, then at one point she tripped over her words, stared into space for a few moments, then shook herself and admitted she was very tired. You’re just not supposed to tell your audience that you’re tired and imply you don’t want to be there.
• A man was also there and he would interject comments every so often. He was much better at speaking than the lady because he seemed to know what he was talking about and spoke with energy. However, neither of them could answer our questions. Michael, a guy in my class, really put the screws to them when he asked something about the future of corn in fuels, I think it was. They fumbled around and then suggested that they were “right with him” on that issue, but “current administration” made things difficult. That seemed to be a big excuse for them throughout our questions, too, was just to blame everything on Congress and the current administration.
• Another scapegoat was that Congress wouldn’t provide them with enough money in some areas where they would like to research further. However, they had given us a big packet of papers (a note on that: I found it funny that the most useless presentation was accompanied by the biggest packet of paperwork) which contained a sheet showing their requested budget for various projects along with what Congress actually gave them. We were moving on to another slide when Chandra had a question: she pointed out that it looked like Congress gave them pretty much exactly the funding they requested, based on that budget sheet, so how was it that they couldn’t allot more funds to some areas than others, since Congress was going along with their proposed budget? Well, they really didn’t have an answer to that, and they kind of fumbled around and made excuses. Chandra kept following up, using their own materials as reference. It was hilarious to watch; I was mentally rooting “Go Chandra!”.
• Whenever someone would ask for more information on a topic, or how they could apply for scholarships, we were told to “go to their web site.” I mention this only because, at the NSF briefing that morning, our speaker complained “I hate it when people tell you go to their web site, because it always means they don’t want to talk to you.”

After that disappointing briefing, a few people went back to the hotel to nap, but I went with a group to the Holocaust Museum. Now I knew about what the Nazis and Hitler did to Jews during WWII, but the Holocaust Museum made it all much more real to me. They had a room filled with old, dusty shoes that were some of those actually taken from the Jews by the Nazis in the concentration camps. They had a railway car that the self-led tour went through, and it was one of the real cars used to transport Jews to a concentration camp. They had several big rooms with high ceilings where all the walls were covered with before-and-after photos from Jewish neighborhoods. All over the place were informative chunks of text with associated photos or objects, and many quotations were on the walls from people like Dwight Eisenhower and Hitler. I got teary eyed in several places in the museum, but I’m glad I went.

I’m kind of mixed up on the dates, but I think that night was when me, Tiffany, Chandra, and Joseph went walking around the city, looking at monuments. We hit up Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, F.D.R., and then the Korean War memorial. This is when I first started to realize that Converse All Stars were not meant to be walking shoes, what with their very thin soles. Oh buddy, were my feet hurting, and they stayed hurting throughout the rest of the trip.

The White House at night from behind.

Lincoln Monument

The next day, our first briefing was with the Department of Homeland Security. By the time we got there, my feet were aching because the Metro had been backed up that morning so we ended up walking several blocks to our destination. It was interesting in a gross way that, just outside the DHS building, it smelled like an open sewer, but when you went inside, the building was gorgeous. The ceiling was all glass and way, waay up there. There was a little indoor park area with big bamboo plants growing all the way up to the ceiling. All around the walls on all the stories were windows to offices; I would love to have an office in such a building where I could look out anytime and see that pretty little bamboo park.

The actual briefing was good, too. We had an older gentleman who talked to us about the science area of DHS, and another, younger guy who talked about the political side. Some of the ideas they mentioned were pretty far out there, like having a device at airports that could determine, based on someone’s facial expression, sweat, and other minor details, whether or not they had a malignant intent. One thing I thought was especially neat was that DHS, under the direction of the older fellow, brought in a bunch of science fiction writers to talk about various technologies they thought were possible in the future. Apparently, not all the staff at DHS approved of that, so our presenter had had to justify the use of those writers, pointing out that many technologies we have today were at least hinted at by science fiction of the past. It also helped that all the writers brought in held Ph. D.’s, and weren’t just bums off the street.

After the DHS presentation, we went on a tour of the Supreme Court. Nothing too exciting there, just an old building with a lot of pretty architecture. We had lunch in the basement where my classmate Tiffany had a chicken pesto sandwich that was fated to give her indigestion for the rest of the day. This is only interesting because later she asked me for some Advil for her stomach, so I passed over my bottle. She proceeded to shake out two pills, hands trembling, and promptly drop them both. She apologized but I didn’t care because I’ve got like a gallon of the stuff here at home, so it really wasn’t a big deal. She shook out two more and didn’t drop them, but then when she put them in her mouth, she held them there a minute, commenting that she “really liked Advil” because they were sweet, and how she liked to suck on them a bit before she actually took them. After the shaky hands and pills spilling everywhere, that was just too much for me, and I told her she’d better watch it, because she was sounding a lot like a druggie at this point. :D

Ceiling of the Supreme Court

After lunch, our group met with the offices of Kentucky’s two senators. We met Senator Bunning in person, but Senator McConnell wasn’t in, so we only met with his legislative assistants. Both meetings were pretty good, though one of McConnell’s assistants mostly read notes from a presentation she’d prepared. We didn’t even get the benefit of seeing the presentation, we just heard her read it aloud. I’ll give her some slack, though, because she’d apparently only been working there a few months and had actually just graduated.

The next day was our last in D.C. We met with one of our representatives, actually meeting him in person because he wasn’t too busy. It was funny because later that day he had a meeting scheduled with the president of UK, so we had to tell the representative to put in a good word for us with the president. I was a bit disappointed afterward because apparently Bill Gates was speaking that day about H-1B visas (booo), and it was available to the public, but it was so crowded our group couldn’t get in. On a side note, I think it’s funny how one of the richest men in the world is petitioning for more H-1B visas so that he can bring in more foreign programmers and pay them less, rather than hiring American programmers and paying them a decent wage. Anyway…

We had a tour of the Capitol Building next, and getting in there was killer because of the security necessary. Our group waited in line with hundreds of other people (my estimating skills are not top notch, so take that figure with a grain of salt) and my aching feet were getting incredibly tired, so I would plop down on the floor, dress pants and all, for a few minutes at a time. My friend Willie would often join me as the only other person not afraid of having to dust off their pants after getting up; I guess his feet hurt, too. When we finally made it to the metal detector, it was the first that I set off. I ended up having to take my shoes off (not that I minded) and go through it again, which worked. I took a lot of photos while on the tour, even though we were kind of herded from one room to the next because of the massive amount of traffic that day.

Inside the Capitol Building

Finally, we had some free time to kill before our flight home. The group I chose went to the Library of Congress, which I would normally love to see, but because of my feet I chose to sit downstairs in the lobby on a very hard bench. I was joined by several people and we waited out the others that went on the tour. They seemed a bit disappointed upon returning because they couldn’t access any of the books.

That afternoon, I ended up waiting in the hotel lobby for time to meet with the group to depart for the airport, again because of my feet. I had changed back into my street clothes, but that didn’t seem to help the two throbbing lumps that were my soles. I read on one of the sofas in the lobby while some others went to Arlington or elsewhere. I enjoyed my reading session and got some Starbucks while I waited.