First an update on the hero posting. Here is a story from today about 2 afghans thwarting a suicide bomber driving a truck containing 300 lbs of explosives. I think they pass the hero test….
Nhi and I visited DC over the long weekend. I hadn’t been since I was small so I wanted to see the sites plus Nhi has a couple friends there. A few interesting things.
As the monuments/memorials go, the FDR memorial was my favorite. Had a lot of info and was nice to walk through. The new WW2 was my least favorite. While I have a lot of respect for that generation, I just didn’t get how the design fit with WW2.
Also, it was neat to have the washington memorial loom over the city as a permanent reminder of the sacrifices it took to found this country as well as the responsibility to maintain its ideals. Also for people who get lost all the time like me it is nice to have a big stone obelisk in the middle of the city. I have already incorporated this idea into my current drafts for the “city of the future”. It was also neat that there was a cutout in the trees around the white house so you can view it from the Jefferson Memorial. Another founding father watching over the white house. Nowadays I think we need more than a big bronze statue though.
And while you never really want to get too caught up in nationalist sentiment, it is hard not to feel patriotic when visiting DC with the monuments and such. Plus going to the National Archives and seeing the Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution was amazing. These are not the best of times for the USA but it was nice to see some of the good things of the past on display.
Finally an oddity. Nhi and I met her friend in DC’s chinatown. Here is a sign from the starbucks:
Notice the Chinese sign as well as the English one. It’s more prominent than I’ve seen anywhere else but it wasn’t that surprising at first. But then I took a look around. There were no Chinese people. At all. Zero. Yet sure enough every sign was in Chinese and English. It was like a theme park. Later we found out that the basketball arena built there a few years ago had basically tripled real estate value in the area and most Chinese people had sold their property. Being used to Chinatown here in San Francisco I found the whole thing pretty amusing.
7 Comments for our nation’s capital
Nina | January 17, 2007 at 4:20 pm
nhi | January 17, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Also, all the stores in DC Chinatown were American stores/restaurants, but with their Chinese names translated. Eg, Urban Outfitters, Ann Taylor, Ruby Tuesdays. There were no actual Chinese stores. It was kind of strange.
jose | January 18, 2007 at 7:38 am
btw, how much do you have to pay to get into the national archives? is it an amount that any american can afford?
i came back from my nation’s capital recently. spent 2-3 days there before boarding the 16 hr flight to ny. none of those feelings however. yes, similar dc chinatownish things are happening, but overall sometimes i was appalled by the lack of respect for the nation’s monuments there. but there are people (quite a few) who feel strongly about them and want to maintain and preserve them. i am deeply inspired to get back into history and learn more about what made those times different and why society there failed to build on accomplishments, india has to be the epitome of such failures. most cultures have one or two advanced societies that existed and then disintegrated but india seems to have them throughout, and yet, overall it lags behind most progressive economies. i think the fundamental reason is laziness embodied in the lack of imperialistic tendencies. you get your rice and curry and the slaves to do your work, who cares about world conquest?
Nina | January 18, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Did you see “Kongdeji” and “Maidanlao” too???
Does a “hanbaobao” taste better in Chinese?
Do they charge more for a Xingbake ka fe?
Author comment by Kireet | January 19, 2007 at 12:23 am
national archives (and all the monuments + smithsonian) are free.
Pallu | January 21, 2007 at 2:29 pm
So are all people in India lazy or just the people those who have “slaves” and are eating rice and curry? I will have to wait for one of my dumb moments to pass before I can comment.
I have been thinking about the poor mom who died in the “Can you hold your Wee for Wii”. Is she hero or just crazy? What are radio stations thinking these days? Not to mention the people who choose to participate and to listen to this stuff. I will confess listening to “will a turkey eat turkey”. However, if the Wii stuff was on my local station I would have immediataley popped in one of my stellar mixed CDS.
Author comment by Kireet | January 22, 2007 at 2:35 pm
i don’t think you can qualify for hero status by holding your pee.
HAH! No wonder Nhi was MIA!!!