Fortunately there are plenty of things to do in Washington DC on a rainy day and I experienced a couple of those museum days on this trip. One Smithsonian museum new since I lived in the area more than twenty years ago is the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. The collection was essentially warehoused in a building in upper Manhattan in New York and received very few visitors until it was decided to build a dedicated museum on the National Mall in DC and convert part of the Customs House in New York to a satellite museum. The new museum is an impressive building, but I have mixed feelings about the displays. The trend in museums is more toward frequently changing exhibits of parts of the collection on specific themes rather than showcasing massive numbers of artifacts as in older museums like the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Some of the current exhibits at the museum are interesting, but overall the displays felt a little sparse for a national museum.

I made short stops at the Hirschhorn Museum, Smithsonian Castle, Museum of African Art, and Sackler Museum of Asian Art, all of which I visited before, and steered clear of the incredibly popular Air and Space Museum, with a long line of people waiting outside in the rain just to get through bag check . That suggests a level of crowding and number of screaming children my nerves can't take. One Smithsonian Museum I have no recollection of visiting is the Freer Gallery, the personal collection of Asian Art given to the nation by industrialist Charles Freer. I suspect it may have been under renovation when I lived in the area in 1990-91.

In the afternoon I met my junior year college roommate and his wife Mary and daughter Julia at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. After Mary and Julia left us, Mark and I went out for beers to Cap City Brewing Company and then on to Chinatown for dinner. Chinatown is on the eastern side of the center of Washington’s downtown, now full of gleaming new office buildings ad barely recognizable from the grungy city center we knew and avoided when we both lived in the DC area in 1990-91 before heading off to graduate school.  "When we used to live here……" came up many times in our conversation in regard to how much the city has changed in those 23 years . Sometimes it doesn’t seem all that long ago, but in other ways it feels like ages.

We were targeting a Burmese restaurant Mark had heard about in Chinatown that intrigued both of us but found it closed. So we settled on a Chinese place. I’ve been back from China for four months now so feel ready for some Chinese food again. The menu the waitress brought us was rather standard and uninspiring, but there were quite a few Chinese people eating far more interesting looking things. “What’s that?” I asked the waitress, “and that?” pointing to the dishes the Chinese patrons had. She brought us another menu but when we tried to order the hotpot off of it she said, “No, not for Americans. Only for Chinese people. American no like!” “Yes, we want it. I’ve had it before. I know what it is.” “No, take to long for you to cook!” She finally let us order it. Chinese hotpot involves a boiling pot of broth in which the diners cook the meats and noodles and vegetables brought to them raw . There are usually a number of dipping sauces and flavorings to make it a real feast. It took a few hours but Mark and I finished all our food; I’d like to believe we earned the waitress’s respect.

After a few more beers at an Irish pub, Mark and I went home our separate ways in the wee hours of the morning. One nice thing about the DC Metro nowadays is that it runs until 3:00 A.M. on the weekends, very convenient for late nights out. It used to shut down at midnight even on the weekends, a real nuisance if you didn’t want to go home early and quite inconsistent with trying to get people not to drink and drive.  

On my first of my two weekends in DC my hosts were my friends Luke and Jared who live close to the U-Street Metro Station, now an up-and-coming area with a huge number of new apartment buildings and condos in the area but pretty much of a down-and-out business district twenty years ago. U Street was one of the commercial centers of Black Washington for many decades. Luke and I have been e-pen pals for quite a few years since we’ve both traveled in some of the same remote parts of the world like Central Asia and West Africa, but this weekend was the first time we met in person.