Good Morning, Washington D.C.!

The weather was happy so the sun was beaming brightly but I was tired and sleepy. Our first stop was the train station to pay the tickets and our first destination was Georgetown University. My favorite part of this trip was going into buildings with air conditioning since it was humid. However, I have to say that the buildings at Georgetown University were beautiful. My first impression of the campus was that it looked very peaceful and calming, it has a vintage feeling and the campus has a lot of greenery. We started off by exploring the university on our own and later joined in on a tour to learn more about the campus, led by a current university student. Georgetown is a private school and was founded in 1789. My favorite part of the tour was learning about the 3 traditions to graduate. The first was to sit on John C. statue’s lap and take a selfie. The second tradition is to steal the clock’s hand from the tower and the students usually give it to someone who they want to invite to give a speech at the campus. The final tradition is to dance on the water fountain.
After visiting Georgetown we ate lunch around the area and then took the bus to the national archive museum. At the museum we were able to see the original constitution and other historical documents. I enjoyed history ever since I took AP United States history in my junior year of high school. We spent hours at the museum when finally we were kicked out, since it was closing time. Afterwards we didn’t know what to do next since there was a miscommunication between the tour and us. The miscommunication was later solved and we were still able to have a tour of the national mall but at a later time, so we decided to hang out at Chinatown and have dinner there. The Chinatown at Washington D.C. was rather shocking and disappointing. You can tell that the neighborhood was completely gentrified. Majority of the stores were American except that their names were in Chinese characters.
After the break at Chinatown we realized how far away we were from the national mall so we ran for it. We made it to the tour in one piece. The tour started by learning about the Washington Monument. The construction process for the Washington Monument was delayed many times due to the reasons of not wanting to continue it and because it was too expensive. Later they used a fundraising technique of donating bricks but there were many controversy with it since during that time there were a lot of anti-immigrants and many people disliked Catholics. So when the Pope donated bricks to the project they destroyed it and the problem continues so the monument was not completed until the 1880s. We also learned that the white house used to be light yellow until it was burned during the war of 1812. The most emotional part of the tour was the memorials of WWII and the memorial of the Vietnam War. And our final stop of the tour was at the front of the steps of the Lincoln’s memorial. We were all very tired so we decided to not climb up the flight of stairs to see the memorial upfront. Overall, it was a really fun day and I can’t wait for the next day to come except that the weather forecast states that it will be raining.
-Lisa Yu