Posts tagged blister

I'm really really behind with these writeups because of how exhausted and busy I've been the past couple days…so here's day 3 a couple days late. Day 4 should be up later today.

Day 3 of vacation was re-arranged slightly to account for the fact that we didn't make the Natural History Museum the day before. Jason's (not me…my friend) legs were hurting quite a bit today from all the walking. Mine weren't doing very well either as several blisters had begun to formed on my right foot making walking very painful.

We started out by just barely making it to the International Spy Museum because the Metro was delayed slightly. The museum itself was really cool. To start off they take you up this elevator which gives the impression you're signing up for a school for spies. They told us to pick a cover story from one of 16 located on the walls and memorize the details and then took us into a briefing room to show an introductory video.

At this point it kinda fell down a bit. A lot of the exhibits were fairly interactive, but after that cool start it dropped back down to a fairly normal museum experience with exhibits and things behind glass and such. That's not to say they didn't have a lot of cool things to look at, but it would have been awesome if they carried through their narrative experience through the entire museum.

Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed inside the museum,so I can't show you the cool stuff. I want an umbrella shotgun and a handgun hidden inside of a pipe.

After a slow trek through the museum, we decided to head back to the hotel for a little while to rest our poor, poor feet. On our way back to the hotel, we took a detour to a Safeway that I found near one of the metro stops. What the map didn't mention was that it was a little over a quarter mile uphill. I grabbed every blister bandage I could find as well as some stuff for lunch since we were going to eat in our rooms.

After an hour or two of rest, Two of us (Jason stayed back at the hotel, due to not feeling well) walked out to the Natural History Museum so we could see a whole bunch of dead things. We took a lot of frequent breaks and made good use of all of the benches there.

They had a very well done Orchid special exhibit set up inside which we walked through. I snapped a bunch of pictures of stuff inside there. It was a long room, designed such that it almost looked like it was actually outside.

After the orchids, we moved into fossil town and checked out the dinosaurs. This was the first dinosaur exhibit I've been to since I was a little kid. The dino's were considerably less scary than they were back then.

Then we entered the non dinosaur dead stuff part of the exhibit which houses the mythical Giant Land Sloth. I'd been looking forward to seeing this monster for quite some time after hearing Wassy discuss it. She's a bit scared of it after seeing it the first time she was at the museum and after having some nightmares about it. Obviously, I wanted to see this monster for myself.

Well…it was actually big. I didn't see it as all that scary, but then again, I wasn't the one that had nightmares about it. It was bigger than I thought it would be. Makes me wonder what, exactly, caused them to go extinct and die off.

After going through the fossilized portion of the museum, we went upstairs to check out some of the human history exhibits. My favorites come out of the Egyptian/ancient civilization sections. I've always been interested in ancient Egypt for some reason, so seeing a real live mummy  (sort of) was fairly cool.

The Mummy was named after the person who donated it. I'm not entirely sure if I'd like to have a mummy named after me…seems kinda morbid. I'm not sure where the lion mosaic came from, however, the workmanship that must have gone into that is stunning.

Finally, we entered the mineral exhibit with the intent to see the Hope Diamond, which we did. It was smaller than I expected it to be, but still impressive. It's extremely clear and has a nice color to it which you probably can't see in my picture due to the lighting.

At this point, my legs were about to give out on me again, so I requested that we head back to the hotel a little early for some rest before going to Olive Garden that night for dinner.

Olive Garden, simply put…was a disaster. First we got off at the wrong metro stop and had to wait about 20 minutes for another train to roll through…then when we got to the right one, it was a HUGE walk from the station through this stupidly winding sidewalk because the pedestrian bridge was closed. Then the service was TERRIBLE. The absolute worst service I've ever had anywhere. It's best that we try and pretend that this dinner didn't happen.

Based on how everybody was feeling, we made the decision to sleep in on Sunday and skip Mt. Vernon. We also had to drop plans of going to a science museum and had the aquarium on the chopping block if we didn't have time as well.

More picture from day 3 can be seen on my flickr account. Click Here!

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