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I got into Baltimore at 9pm. From the view of Baltimore that met me, it was a pretty empty and lifeless city. It may well be, but I soon realised I was simply in the middle of nowhere. The Baltimore Travel Plaza, other than being the arrival station for Greyhound buses and various cheap and dodgy Chinatown buses (one of which I had been on, of course), there’s not much there, or at least not after dark. There was a line of taxis, and even when I jumped in one up front, another taxi driver was upset, claiming that he was there before (even if he wasn’t in line).

The taxi was Hadar’s suggestion. Hadar, another friend from her exchange in Sydney, was the person whose father I had stayed with the few nights before in Brooklyn. She was staying a few weeks with her mother in Baltimore. The taxi driver was friendly, and the first woman taxi driver whose driven me here. She spoke of her husband in Sydney who lectures in political science at some university she can’t recall. Maybe Macquarie.

She also took as long as it takes to get to Hadar’s—a long time. It was the highest taxi fare I’ve ever paid. More than total interstate travel from NYC to Baltimore, Baltimore to Washington and back to NYC. More than the 6 hours from LA to Vegas. Yikes. But once you’re in the taxi and halfway there, there’s not much you can do, especially at that time of night. You just keep on hoping and expecting that your destination is only a minute away, and then it isn’t.

After arriving and eating, I proceeded to show Hadar all my photos, which took a few hours before bed. Bed and breakfast. Peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches prepared for lunch. Out to see the sites of Baltimore. There aren’t too many of them (and maybe I could have done with the spare day in DC…), but we went down to the Inner Harbour area, and first checked out the Star Spangled Banner Museum.

This odd museum is built in a house that in the early 19th century was home to Mary Pickersgill whose occupation as a flag-maker and connections with important people led her to the task of sewing the absoulutely massive Star Spangled Banner (9×14m US flag with 15 stars and 15 stripes) that flew after victory in an 1812 battle with the British at Baltimore. The guided tour through Mary’s house (belonging to the museum since about 100 years after her death) brought us into 19th-century living as a widow, sewing flags and ensuring meals for 9 in the 3-storey house (of course she had a couple of servants on site to help in the hot stone-floored kitchen). The museum outside of her actual house focussed mostly on the historic battle, a little on the sewing of the flag and Mary’s family possessions, and also on the writing of the national anthem reflecting on the flying of the flag. Its opening presentation also included an amusingly poor reenactment typical of small museums. It was, though, surprisingly interesting and fun to see.

Hanging out in the Inner Harbour area (wandering along the harbour-front, avoiding the aquarium), we went into a shopping mall that’s mostly filled with souvenier shops (t-shirts, hats and what-not) and food shops. There we discovered the Fudge Song, sung by the workers of the fudgery as they fudged their way around. Basically, selling sweet food with entertainment and charisma while making it in front of the audience. Was interesting. And peanut-butter-jelly (jelly being grape jam) sandwiches are nice but not great, IMO.

In the afternoon, out of things to do, we visited the new Museum of African American History & Culture. We had to rush a little, though (I’ve said this many times about going to museums in the afternoon—bad habit of mine). It was interesting at times but I found it rarely revealed much new and interesting information to me, and was organised in such a way that it was not particularly easy to make one’s way around an exhibit. It included galleries on African Americans in culture and in politics, in families and in history. Its special exhibit was on African American farmers, and while it expressed their plight and the discrimination in a white-dominated industry (related to historical land-ownership rights), it was simply a little obscure. So not bad altogether, but I expect the upcoming Smithsonian museum in DC will be more comprehensive and, of course, free.

And on the topic of DC, it was soon after leaving that museum that I caught a train, walked and caught another to the nation’s capital. There I was to stay with the family of Daniella Schmidt (actually in Silver Spring, Baltimore) who had spent the first semester of 2006 at the University of Sydney. But more than anything on my arrival, I was excited that the gates to insert my ticket and enter the train station were similar to Cityrail’s back home. A little bit of urban nostalgia. Only the tickets were more expensive than any other city I had been in, while working somewhat more sensib than Sydney’s system (buy one ticket and reuse it until you’re out of money).

Okay, I guess I was also excited about seeing Daniella. But first I got to meet her parents, who I chatted with while I ate dinner after her father had collected me from the train station. The family is Big on Habonim and their other two children had just got back from camp, so one was hyperactive and the other unwakeable. Daniella eventually arrived home and very excitedly greeted me. Soon I was showing her too my photo collection, but sleep beat us to completion.

The morning sun rose, and eventually so did I. Not as late as some days, but maybe not as early as I’d hoped: only two days in DC and so many free museums to see! The first (after my Cheerios and a bus-train collaboration to get me to the National Mall) was the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The museum will soon be under renovation, so most directions I turned were met with big yellow signs basically saying “back in 2 years”. This wasn’t so bad seeing as I was short of time even with the few exhibits that were open. I spent most of my time at “Americans at War” which showcased weapons, maps, flags and propaganda associated with all of the wars of the USA. Other sections of the museum focussed on popular culture and media or on technology and industry, and while I didn’t get to all that I would have liked to, I did get to see a collection of original Muppets.

Soon enough it was lunch time, and I wandered over through the sculpture garden (at Daniella’s recommendation of seeing a house that is actually a concave structure and an optical illusion) to the National Archives. There they exhibit some major documents of the country’s history, such as its Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and an early copy of the Magna Carta, while providing exhibits to illustrate the archives’ purpose: patents, declassified police records, historic recordings and documents, and a Presidential Library collecting photo and film detailing the lives and families of Bushes, Clintons, Kennedys and Trumans.

For those of you who have never been to Washington DC, many of the Smithsonian museums are lined up along what is known as the National Mall. This “mall” stretches westward from Capitol Hill (where congress congregates), past many museums to the Washington Monument (pointy phallic thing), via many government buildings to the Lincoln Memorial, where big Uncle Abe sits idly in his Greek temple. On the grass patches where there are no tourists wandering or on segways, there is usually a group of athletes training or kids playing soccer.

So I crossed the mall to the National Air and Space Museum, also a Smithsonian enterprise. There they document the history of humanity’s ventures off the face of our planet. Much of the aviation industry was built through American innovation, so the museum inevitably focusses on this: Wright brothers, space races, moon-landings, Bell labs’ microchip-powered systems, jets and helicopters at war, space stations… Incidentally, while deliberations were ongoing about the definitions of planets, their exhibit on our own galaxy at large was closed for renovation. With some very large artefacts on display, the museum was quite impressive and fun.

But it did close at 5:30, as many of the museums do on a Wednesday, leaving only the Museum of Natural History to hold its breath for another two hours before gasping the tourists out its doors too. Possibly the most famous of the Smithsonian collections, it follows through the story of life, showing off a wide array of fossils (trilobite collections) and stuffed animals (and by that I don’t mean teddy bears). I also saw some collections from human life with an exhibit on the Sikhs, and another on African cultures, and the interactions of Lewis and Clark with the native peoples in their expedition across North America, as well as a gallery of photographs from Antarctica. Due to that closing time, I saved the geology-focussed parts of the museum (including the Hope Diamond) for a day that didn’t come on this trip.

The end of the day had come and I looked for dinner, and found veggie patties to heat up in the oven. Daniella meanwhile had put herself to bed, ill. I soon put myself to bed, well.

After all, I was rising early to get to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum was very moving and well-arranged. It effectively gave the feeling that each component in the leadup to this great tragedy and Final Solution came so suddenly, and in that sense was very overwhelming. While many of the materials on display were disasterously impressive, this museum as compared to others was much less about collection and more about experience. Out of the permanent exhibit they also explored other genocides of our world, and implored the emergency of awareness of what is happening in Darfur, Sudan; also a collection of editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, giving the forgery’s history and a story of its continual revival in various communities acrosss the world.

The afternoon I spent at the International Spy Museum which Hadar had initially recommended. Annoyingly, though, this museum was both a walk from the mall and not free. But while it was nowhere near as big as the Smithsonian wonders, this museum was both fun and on a much more unusual topic. It begins by trying to put you in the roleplay position of a spy, which I found it didn’t do so effectively: while it tested you on memorising a few facts, the roleplay wasn’t continued throughout the museum. Still, they began with fascinating exhibits on spying technologies and skills: bugging, lock-picking, information gathering and transmission, weaponry, sabotage and disguise (to recall a few). It then had exhibits on the history of spying and intelligence, highlighting many interesting cases, as well as code making and breaking, and spying in the Cold War. The museum was actually a bit long and unidirectional, and with all food and drink forbidden this made for a bit of an uncomfortably hungry experience by the end of the museum; it was also quite America focussed (and biased) for its “International” title (see an interesting Washington Post review). I also wonder, with all the technologies on show that seem very clever, how much more advanced the materials must be that are currently in use in the field.

That evening (after consuming some snacks to keep me going), I decided to stay out and see the sites of DC, and maybe Daniella would come out and join me on the town. So I wandered down to meet Abe Lincoln, and spent some time in his temple. I also visited Al Einstein bronze and slouched in some corner behind the street 5 minutes walk from Lincoln. I tried to contact Daniella, continuing up towards George Washington University. The uni looked nice, although I didn’t see too much as it was dark, that is except for a group of freshman girls being cruelly inducted into college life by their dorm advisors. I finally got onto Danielle. She was still sick and not coming out.

I continued north by foot to Dupont Circle where she said there might be some night-life. There was a little life out there, but not the sorts of atmospheres that I felt like entering by myself. I wandered around. I had a donut (doughnut…?). I gave some money to a guy on the street so that he could have one too. I went into a bookstore/cafe/bar and flicked through a few books and listened to the mediocre live pianist. I realised that I still had a train and bus to catch and was only hoping the bus still ran late enough. I caught the train, and waited for the bus. I waited a little more, and started looking for a timetable. I was too late—the next thing to find was a taxi. The taxi only cost the price of 5 bus rides anyway, so I did get to the quiet house eventually (and attempted to write this blog entry but it still took another week to publish).

PS: A big mazel tov to everyone getting married, and a small boo to those who didn’t tell me. =)