We woke up and caught an Uber to the Holiday Inn. The Uber was surprisingly inexpensive at $27 for the 45 minute trip. By the time we checked into the hotel it was lunch time and raining so we went to a Korean place right next to the hotel called the Rice Bar which had fairly decent rice bowls for $12 each. After lunch, we ran through the rain back to the hotel to have a rest until the rain stopped around dinnertime and following our usual practice our first stop in Washington D.C. was Chinatown.
Washington D.C.’s Chinatown had a big Chinese gate and some street signs in Chinese but proved to be the smallest, saddest Chinatown we had visited so far. There were seven or eight sad, mostly empty Chinese restaurants and a very small Asian convenience store. About the most Chinese thing about the Chinatown was the Sharetea Bubble Tea store. We had seen better Chinatowns that weren’t even labeled Chinatown. One Asian strip-mall in Houston is twice the Chinatown that the D.C. Chinatown is. Still we found a rather expensive Chinese restaurant for dinner. The food was mediocre at best.
After dinner we walked to a Safeway grocery store where we managed to spend over $100 to buy some simple foods we could eat in the hotel like bottled water, bread, sandwich meat, fruit and instant noodle cups before heading back to the hotel for the night.
One of the main things we wanted to see in D.C. is the Smithsonian Museum. The Smithsonian Museum is not just one museum but a collection of 17 museums and the National zoo, way too many to see in any short amount of time so we had to choose only a few. Many of the museums are closed on Monday and Tuesday so the first museum we went to was the National Museum of Natural History which happened to be open on Tuesday.
This is a huge museum and we spent most of the day looking things like the Hope Diamond, fossils, sea creatures and many, many other exhibits until Olivia’s little brain filled to capacity for the day.
Leaving the museum we walked to the White House where we took a few pictures. There really isn’t much else to see or do at the White House since they are not giving tours anymore so we only stayed for a short time before heading to the Washington Monument.
You need advanced tickets to go into the Washington Monument so we just admired it for a while. We were tired from all the walking and it was quickly getting cold so we headed back to the hotel to eat dinner in our room.
