I found this unusual area in Washington DC that had a series of quirky mirrored pyramids. I walked around and around with my big black backpack looking for interesting shots and I am pretty sure security thought I was a terrorist. Whenever they looked at me strange, I would yell out “Praise Allah!” and then they would just back off…

After I left the Washington Monument, I took a long walk around the tidal basin to see the Jefferson Memorial then went around to the FDR Monument. The latter was really cool and I had never seen it before. It was a series of waterfalls over granite and a bunch of FDR’s quotes etched into the walls, all of which look rather Marxist in retrospect (Freedom from want… etc.).

It was about 1 AM when I got to this memorial and Ii was all alone, except for a rather well-dressed man, although he was without pants, wading through the bottom of the waterfall. At first, I thought he was drunk, but then I realized he was gathering up coins with his feet before bending down to get them. When he saw me, he screamed and scampered off into the night dropping coins right and left. It was a really surreal scene, but funny.

Here we see the Socialist arm of the US Federal Government in its full glory, as hapless victims of the proposed panacea of Marxism stay warm on the steamy grates of the IRS building in Washington DC.

I took this picture at midnight on the mall. All the flags were at half-mast and I don’t know why. DC tends to lower the flags for almost any reason nowadays. I think now they lower it automatically for a week whenever a Kennedy goes into rehab.

I had extra time this afternoon so I got into a taxi and went over to the National Arboretum. It was my first time there and I didn’t know what to expect but I was really blown away by the variety. The park was immense and I am convinced that I walked somewhere between 8 and 10 miles. I took a lot of pictures and it will take a while to process them all, but I put a few beneath. The first one of that honeybee is worth a zoom to Flickr to see the larger sizes (click on +All Sizes above the picture), and the second one has some columns in the lower left that were the original columns from the capitol back in the 1800’s. The third one is a small Vietnamese child that apparently made a wrong turn in Hanoi.

By the way, there is no food to be found anywhere inside the arboretum, so you will have to live off the land.

My plane landed late and I got into the hotel about 10:30 AM. I am pretty close to the mall so I threw on my iPod, queued up my weird new age playlist, and grabbed my camera to walk around outside and take pictures. The weather was perfect so I just wore a t-shirt and jeans, so as to not arouse suspicion while approaching national monuments with a big black backpack. I also chose to leave my Muslim prayer cap in the room.

The pictures below were taken at around midnight with HDR. The first is the Jefferson Memorial reflected in the tidal pool. The second is the Korean War memorial. The third is a huge bronze statue of FDR which turned out really cool in HDR.