Day 5: Of Water and History

Note that these entries are part of a series that I am posting after the fact. (Sorry about that: I did not have any time to find a free WiFi spot to even check my email.) Please use the search box in the page header to look for other daily entries about my inaugural travels and activities.

Today, the family decided to visit the National Aquarium, which, bizarrely enough, is located in a Department of Commerce building. There were some interesting species, but I think the combination of not having anywhere to sit during the hour it took to walk all the way through and our level of fatigue really made this the most uninteresting part of this trip thus far. Still, the little ones found it fun. I guess that counts for something, right?

After our tour of life under the sea, we headed to the nearby United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which reminded us of darker days in history and tugged at our heart strings. Security was especially strict here, given the sensitive nature of the exhibits, and one is required to obtain a pass for entrance to the main exhibit hall at a particular time. Plan ahead; we did not and ended up waiting just over two hours for our entrance slot. If you do get stuck waiting, though, there are exhibits one can visit outside the main portion of the museum. We walked through the Deadly Medicine exhibit and Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story. Overall, the museum contains potent images of the horrors that accompanied Nazi Germany’s rise to power just more than 60 years ago.

That such events could have occurred so recently in the large span of human history is mind-boggling and sickening to the heart. Human beings are capable of experiencing and creating the most wondrous of things but can also inflict the deepest of pains.

Our stay at the museum lasted well until 4:30 pm, by which time, we were thoroughly exhausted. Still, some members wanted to go see the Einstein Planetarium show, Infinity Express: A 20-Minute Tour of the Universe, at the National Air and Space Museum, so we headed over and caught the last show of the day.

Dinner was had at the Hard Rock Café, but the directions to the “nearest” metro stop from the National Air and Space Museum were wrong, and we ended up much farther away than anticipated. I knew the Smithsonian stop was the quickest, but I was not made aware of our destination until we actually found ourselves lost. Oh, well. In fact, the station to which we were directed was closed, but this small fact was not found out until halfway down the extremely long escalator when I noticed the gate was down. The up escalator was still running, so we promptly started back up, and half-way up the whole thing shut off, lurching all the family members forward. Funny stuff. Anyway, we made it to another entrance to the same metro stop (one of the big ones) that was open and headed out for dinner.