DC

I’ve been to Washington, DC now half a dozen times, beginning in the early 90s with my ex-wife. We came in the heat of summer and toured various parts of the Smithsonian, taking periodic breaks in the centre of the mall, where we cooled our over-heated selves with fresh lime juice and sugar, combined with water on ice, from various street vendors. During another visit, I entertained a group of Japanese tourists with my pantomime explanation of what was exciting about a small sliver of grey stone mounted so you could touch it. The stone was brought back by one of the Apollo missions, from the surface of the moon. On a trip last year, Milena arranged for me to walk the length of the mall, visiting each of the presidential and war memorials in turn. Our favourites included the ghostly soldiers from Korea (www.nps.gov/kowa/), the clever quotations by George Mason, who said most of the smart things you see in the Declaration of Independence, for instance (www.nps.gov/gemm/), and the extended waterworks for FDR. He sits life-sized and ground level in his wheelchair, with his bronze cheeks rubbed shiny by kissing teenage girls, who take turns sitting on his lap while their boyfriends pretend to push the chair. That’s my idea of a nice statue.

[I am afraid that I can't find an image of this statue, although they mention it on the nps site. What they have instead is the monumental main statue, which is definitely not the same. The one I'm thinking of is apparently in the "prologue room."]

Nine Shopping Days to Christmas
On this trip, Milena and I decided to do a little conspicuous consuming. We visited Macy’s, Target, Victoria’s Secret, the Sony Store, the Apple Store, Radio Shack, Barnes and Noble, and Armani, collecting prestigious shopping bags as we went. One of the highlights of our trip was a large black man who knew everything there is to know about Hong Kong action movies. He sold me four that I’d never heard of before, entitled respectively: Dororo, The Promise, Shadowless Sword, and Legend of the Evil Lake. Actually, I think two of them are Korean and one is Japanese, and they all resemble extended-play video games. In Dororo, the hero was born with no limbs, so his father provided him with false limbs that conceal swords. He can get his limbs back, provided that he systematically kills all the demons responsible. I can hardly wait to watch them. I’ve also already begun to download online Wuxia novels to load into my new Sony E-Reader, with its innovative epaper display.

The DC Metro
One of the nicest things about this city is its underground, which is fast and clean and generally efficient. There is a sometimes alarming official American tendency to periodically warn us all that untended packages are a threat to life and limb, but in person the people seem very warm and kindly. You can stop people on the street and they take an interest in the fact that you are lost, and will help find you a map and point you in the opposite direction from the one you’ve been going. There are a gajillion lines on the DC Metro, all coded by colour, and Milena and I will occasionally find that we are riding the orange line instead of the yellow one, but fortunately they also tend to intersect at multiple points, so you don’t really have to backtrack a whole lot. Many of the exits from the underground are also at attractive locations, so you come up the escalator to find yourself facing some national monument or flashy mall full of Christmas shoppers.

University of Maryland
It’s big and sprawling, made largely of red brick buildings with monumental pillars out in front. You hike across an endless parking lot only to find that now you have to climb a hill, turn a corner, and repeat the process a couple of times. But it’s all worth it when you find a room full of some of the smartest people in the world, talking about the research project you’re all tackling together. Unfortunately, the U of M is found in the United States, which means that on at least two occasions I had to help the person selling me my coffee with her arithmetic, and the taxi drivers routinely laugh at me when I ask them if they have ever taken any classes here. “It’s too expensive,” they say. “Not like in Canada—it’s free there, right?” They are thinking, of course, of health care.

Pirates of the Caribbean III: At Wit’s End
If you have been following my adventures closely, you may recall a celebratory moment during my recent flight to Ottawa, when I mentioned that Disney had spared us the nuclear family at the end. Well, Marley gently disillusioned me the other day, since apparently all you need to do is wait until the credits are done. Milena hadn’t seen the third movie, so we watched it here, and sure enough, there’s Kiera Knightley and her 9-year-old son. Since Pirates IV is going to be about the fountain of youth, it occurred to me that the whole thing could be children as pirates before Disney is done with it.