Whilst DC no doubt has numerous interesting characters, 
It’s rare to see a huge amount of people trapsing the boiling streets of DC, so instead of my usual people watching, i headed along the broad streets, lined with imposing white giants
to see as many of the monuments, memorials and mammoth museums as was possible in the short time (2 days of sightseeing) i had available. Whilst there were many that i either didn’t want to, or wasnt able to, go in and explore, i was still able to marvel at their outwards grandeur. Pictured below is the National Archives and Records Administration which contains the United States Government’s Charters of Freedom, the U. S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.
The records of the nation’s civil, military and diplomatic activities are also held by the National Archives for present and future generations.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
An extremely moving and confronting experience was visiting the Holocaust Museum. 
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” 
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). 
Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe.
As well as documenting all of the facts surrounding the Holocaust, it also gave an extremely confronting human element to the horrific event we have heard so much about, but for them most part, have never properly listened. It’s the kind of experience that made me feel so incredibly uncomfortable that half way through, knowing how the story ended (it’s presented chronologically) and feeling emotionally numb – all i wanted to do was leave. Due to the deisgn of the museum – this is virtually impossible as you are directed along a one way route through the exhibitions. WHilst i certainly walked faster than i did at the beginning, i was glad it made me stay, as each photograph, each piece of clothing, each video, and each testament from survivors greatly contributed to my understanding of the Holocaust.
Union Station
A great point of reference for me during my time in DC, was the grande building of Union Station (est 1908).
This beautiful train station was my initial point of arrival, where i came to get the metro back to my hosts and one night, i even had dinner here at one of it’s restaurants !
Washington Memorial
Another icon of DC, towering above the rest, is the Washington Monument. The monument is an obelisk near the west end of the National Mall, built to commemorate the first U.S. president, General George Washington. The monument, made of marble, granite, and sandstone, is both the world’s tallest stone structure and the world’s tallest obelisk, standing at 169.294 m.
The Whitehouse
Just across from the monument, i patiently made my way between a crowd to reach the gate through which i peered in at the Whitehouse! The beautiful (but somewhat unimaginatively named) building has been the residence of every U.S. President since John Adams in 1789!
The central Executive Residence flanked by the East Wing and West Wing. The Chief Usher coordinates day to day household operations and has a staff of 90 workers to assist him. The White House includes: six stories and 5,100 m² of floor space, 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, twenty-eight fireplaces, eight staircases, three elevators, five full-time chefs, a tennis court, a (single-lane) bowling alley, a movie theater, a jogging track, a swimming pool, and a putting green. – not bad Mr President!
Barack Obama speaking with Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office 2009
a stark contrast to the house of Australia’s current Prime minister – Julia Gillard! I’d imagine it has maybe 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a cosy living room and kitchen area combined? Perfectly adequate, but, not quite the Whitehouse…..
"The Brown House?" The house of Australian Prime Minister - Julia Gillard
across from the Whitehouse on the sprawling fields of the mall – hundreds of people were out sporting team colours and playing softball
National World War II Memorial
I made my way down to the (relatively recently added) World War 2 Memorial
Consisting of 56 pillars and a pair of arches one inscribed “Atlantic” and the other, “Pacific” surrounding a plaza and fountain
The Freedom Wall has 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 Americans who died in the war. In front of the wall lies the message “Here we mark the price of freedom“
The Lincoln Memorial
The WWII memorial looks towards the Abraham Lincoln Memorial, dedicated who a man who has long stood in the minds of the American people as a symbol of honesty, integrity, and humanity. Worldwide, he’s renowned for his commitment to abolishing slavery.
The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple. My hosts very kindly took me in to DC just so we could go around a visit most of the memorials in one go. We went at night as it’s particularly beautiful and the temperature is MUCH more forgiving.
It contains a large seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address. The memorial has been the site of many famous speeches, like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered August 28, 1963
Heres something quirky! – Some have claimed, that the face of General Robert E. Lee was carved onto the back of Lincoln’s head. Lee was basically Lincolns arch rival as he was the commanding general of the Confederate (A group of pro-slavery Southern States) army in the American Civil War and a postwar icon of the South’s “lost cause” and looks back across the Potomac toward his former home, Arlington House, now within the bounds of Arlington National Cemetery. Looking closing at Lincolns hair left of his ear, there seems to be the clear profile of a nose and you really can see a human portrait!
It looks directly across to the Washington Monument which is eerily beaIuitful at night
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
After the Abe Lincoln we also went and visited the Vietnam Memorial. Truly something special. it actually goes beneath ground level and is a stark, long black wall, listing the name of every single soldier who died in the war.
Here’s an aerial view to give you a better idea of it’s layout
Aerial view of the Vietnam Memorial
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
The next memorial we drove to The memorial of Franklin D Roosevelt. The expansive memorial traces 12 years of the history of the United States through a sequence of four outdoor rooms, one for each of FDR’s terms of office.
Thomas Jefferson Memorial
The next and final memorial of the evening was in tribute to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the third President of the United States (1801–1809) and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776).
Jefferson was one of the most influential Founding Fathers, known for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States
And that rounded off a momentous visit to a few of the top Monuments and Memorials of DC!
and to the Freer Gallery, which came highly recommended by one of my hosts. Along with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, it forms the Smithsonian Institution’s national museums of Asian art. The gallery was founded by 
The Freer houses 25,518 objects spanning 6,000 years of history, including but not limited to ancient Egyptian stone sculpture and wooden objects, ancient Near Eastern ceramics and metalware, Chinese paintings and ceramics, Korean pottery and porcelain, Japanese Byōbu, Persian manuscripts, and Buddhist sculpture. Collections span from the Neolithic to modern eras.
In 1814, British forces invaded the capital burning and severely damaging the Capitol, Treasury, and White House. Most government buildings were quickly repaired, but the Capitol, which was at the time largely under construction, was not completed in its current form until 1868
The National Mall’s status as a wide, open expanse at the heart of the capital makes it an attractive site for protests and rallies of all types. One notable example is the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a political rally for African American civil rights, at which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Founded as a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, Harlem (named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands) was a synonym for elegant living through a good part of the nineteenth century.
As New York grew, the area became increasingly developed. A construction glut and a delay in the building of the subway led to a fall in real estate prices which attracted Eastern European Jews to Harlem in large numbers, reaching a peak of 150,000 in 1917. But Jewish Harlem was ephemeral and by 1930 only 5,000 Jews remained. 
In the 1920s and 1930s, the neighborhood was the locus of the “Harlem Renaissance“, an outpouring of artistic and professional works without precedent in the American black community. Harlem was the center of a flowering of black culture but they were sometimes excluded from viewing what their peers were creating. Some jazz venues, including most famously the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played, and Connie’s Inn, were restricted to whites only. In the 1920s and 1930s, between Lenox and Seventh avenues in central Harlem, over 125 entertainment places operated, including speakeasies, cellars, lounges, cafes, taverns, supper clubs, rib joints, theaters, dance halls, and bars and grills. In 1936, Orson Welles produced his famous black Macbeth at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem..jpg "harlem")
However with job losses in the time of the Great Depression and the deindustrialization of New York City after World War II, rates of crime and poverty increased significantly. The neighborhood began to deteriorate to a slum. In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of NYC’s blacks, but it remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle-class blacks left for the outer boroughs (primarily the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs. The percentage of Harlem that was black peaked in 1950, at 98.2%. Thereafter, Hispanics and, more recently, white residents have increased their share.
I knew i’d get the most benefit from a locally guided tour (as apposed to my usual wandering) and the guided trolley tour of local galleries was exactly what i was after.
The tour started at the 
As well as the works installed for long-term view, they also have about 3 temporary exhibition, and the feauture exhibit when i visited was dedicated to Sol LeWitt. Sol LeWitt was the man who made conceptual art an appealing concept. For almost four decades, LeWitt, who died in 2007 at 78, made immense abstract wall drawings that he conceived but almost never executed himself.
His method was to devise a set of instructions — for instance, draw 10,000 ten-inch lines, covering the wall evenly — that could be carried out by assistants or, for that matter, by anyone. Often he never even saw the finished work, much less touched it. LeWitt’s art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the ideas behind the works that surpass each work itself. I asked the museum guide what would happen when the exhibit was over, as these were drawn right on the walls, and he said they’d be painted over so it could be installed in another location
Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), presents a closed form, an exception in Serra’s oeuvre: extravagantly tilting, obviously hollow, it encourages a kind of vertigo as the viewer edges around the deliberately constricted space, a site selected by the artist for its snug fit and for the dramatic immediacy of the encounter.
For in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration. Rolled-steel plates, each two inches thick and weighing twenty tons, stand abutted. This forthright, direct presentation, characteristic of Serra’s aesthetic, gives little hint of the fundamental newness and potency of the experience offered in these monumental works—and also fails to betray the prolonged and difficult process of their realization. By Serra’s account, the initial idea for this body of work was breathtakingly simple: take an elliptical volume of space and torque it. 
The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. At the time, it was America’s premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism. It has been widely acknowledged for drawing many European Modernists to live in the city and greatly propelling and encouraging American Modernists aswell. MoMA’s midtown location underwent extensive renovations from 2002-4, redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. The renovation project nearly doubled the space for MoMA’s exhibitions and programs and features 630,000 square feet (59,000 m2) of new and redesigned space. MoMA’s reopening brought controversy as its admission cost increased from US$12 to US$20 but i was able to enter free of charge, sliding past lines thanks to my friends Membership card 
