A Day in (Very, Very Windy) Washington, DC

Yesterday I went to Washington, DC to take a tour of the main campus of George Washington University. Even though the heavy wind made it feel ten times colder than it was, I enjoyed the tour and the entire day.

I began by meeting with two of the administrators in my desired program. That was nice, I got all of my questions answered. After that I got to go on a campus tour. It started in the building that housed the cafeteria (at least the main dining facility--there are several places to eat around the whole area). No one else showed up for the tour, so I basically got a personalized intro to the school. It helped that our tour guide was a student in my desired program, so she was very helpful to me about specific concerns and questions. The University is very nice, I am very glad I applied there.

After the tour my mother and I had lunch, and then we got on the Metro and saw the new exhibit at the Freer/Sackler Gallery called "Roads of Arabia". (It's fortunate that we got to see it when we did--it's apparently set to close sometime this month.) I only know a little about the history of Saudi Arabia from what I learned in college while taking a class on the history of the ancient Near East. There was a little bit about the Persian Empire said in that class, but I would have liked to learn a bit more. Thanks to this exhibit, I got my wish. They had a little bit of everything, such as Neolithic tools and arrowheads, anthropomorphic stelae (tablets or slabs of stone that are made to look like people), bronze sculptures, and inscriptions with Aramaic and other pre-Arabic languages of the region. (I have always been fascinated by languages, so that was one of my favorite parts.)

The Freer/Sackler Gallery is dedicated to Asian art, which I like very much. On the way to the Arabia exhibit, we saw statues of Hindu gods and Buddhas from India and Tibet, and in the center of the whole Gallery, from the ceiling to the lower level, was a sculptural display of monkeys, each one made to look like the word "monkey" in different languages (Russian, Italian, Indonesian, and even Braille, to name a few).

Unfortunately we could not stay at the Gallery very long, as we hoped to make it back home before rush hour (which we got stuck in anyway). But I do hope to go back, as the art museums of the Smithsonian are the ones I do not visit as much as the history museums. I think I need to fix that.