July 5 - July 8

 

Saturday - Day Four After the sightseeing marathon yesterday we decided to take it a little easier today. Also, as the IB results had come out, we spent the morning corresponding with various students (well done guys!). Like the rest of Washington (and the whole tourist population of the city too, it seemed) we planned to visit some of the museums on the Mall in the afternoon, and set out around noon. The first museum we entered was the first we came to - the Museum of American History. This we entered from one direction (there are two main entrances) and as we did so, Philip said: "I remember this". He came to Washington in 1975 with a choir tour, and at that time he did many of the touristy things. There were thousands of people and their out-of-town relatives and their children milling around, which made looking at exhibits rather confining, crowded and claustrophobic (to say the least). That didn't stop us from getting caught up in one temporary exhibit - the Age of Information. This began with the invention of Morse Code (by an American, Mr Morse) and the telegraph (invented simultaneously, like so many things, on either side of the Atlantic), and the exhibit provided examples of early telegraph machines and the encoding and decoding of a message in Morse (does anyone still know Morse Code? . . . - - - . . . ). Then it moved on to the telephone (first used to transmit sounds, like beeps - Morse Code again - till Alexander Bell & co figured out how to transmit the human voice). Next came radio waves and the wireless telegraph, and then (not surprisingly) the radio - both the receiver and the transmitter - itself. After that, TV!!! (Lots of old radio sets & ancient TVs around). Then we moved on to typewriters etc, and then the early computers. The recent past (i.e. OUR past, though it probably predates many people reading this page - the past of record players & reel-to-reel tape recorders as well as of the early TI and HP calculators) was also covered, and then there was a whole section on How To Make a Microchip. And then we moved on to look at computers and the wave of the future - i.e. High Definition Television (HDTV) etc. We spent quite a while looking at this exhibit, playing with the cipher & code section of the wartime inventions, and the enigma machine. Then, when it got too crowded for comfort we left and went looking for other exhibits. These were ok, but not as detailed and interactive as the first, as many of them were permanent exhibits and so not so easily played with. Conspicuous by their absence were exhibits about the first Americans. Nico was anxious to move on, as there are 13 museums and galleries on the Mall, and she wanted to make it to the Natural History Museum, where she suspected stuff would have a more anthropological turn. And it did, to some degree. The time spent in the Natural History Museum was rather frustrating, not only because it seemed that ALL the little children had come there to see the dinosaurs, but also because this museum had a smorgasbord approach to displays - more stuff than one can take in, and not much in detail. On one floor were exhibits about dinosaurs, the evolution of life on earth (starting with crustaceans & corals, and moving on up to Man), the Native Peoples of the Americas (complete with a mural depicting samples from each region, from north to south), cultures of Asia, the Pacific and Africa, a special exhibit about three Viking women in Greenland, and an Imax theatre showing a film about the Galapagos. Whew. I (Nico) was most interested in the Peoples of the Americas gallery. It was very much like an ancient ethnography; the people depicted in it were presented as though they were savages and had no exposure to each other or to Europeans, just as though they were isolated bounded communities, perfect evolutionary specimens preserved just so they would fit beautifully into the museum. I took pictures of the various people - the 'Tuparnaks' and the 'Junes' there, as well as the 'Sereanas' (there was an exhibit on Fiji), but not the 'Annas'. (There were also no Trobrianders)! There was one glass case on the potlatch, just as there were glass cases on each set of people. Philip thought that the First Nations Gallery in the Royal BC Museum was far better done. This museum provided a lot of little things, but not enough detail (or complexity) on one particular subject. I thought that it had the potential, if, say, this was all Joe Public got to see of Native American culture, to be very damaging, as it was perfectly stereotypical and as the exhibits had the look of having been around for forty years or so. I'm sure that there must be alternative presentations of American Indian culture, but there seem to be no permanent ones in this museum other than these. All very interesting to me, to say the least. As I say, the museum was crawling with people, and the longer we stayed the more people appeared. So Philip and I soon decided to cut our losses and leave. We walked back to the hotel for a rest and made reservations at a genuine Tuscan restaurant (it won an award from Italy for being the best Italian restaurant outside Italy). There we dined, having a traditional 3-course meal of appetizer, pasta and main course, followed by dessert & coffee, and then we walked back to the hotel, where we now recline, recounting our day and thinking lazily about our drive tomorrow to the Big Apple.

back to chicago

back to day 3

on to new york city

victoria	ashland	san francisco
los angeles	new mexico	denver
chicago	washington	new york city
boston	quebec city	montreal
toronto	barrie	miami
nassau	map	home