Samantha Ling

National Zoo

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:03:04 GMT

Oh look, llama butt. What a surprise.

The last thing we did in DC (yes, we were there for a few days!), was go to the National Zoo. We didn’t get there until after lunch again. I know! It’s not that we were lazy, but that with four people in the house and one bathroom, that sort of extends your getting ready time by a little bit.

So the National Zoo is free, but the parking costs about $20 and is a total bitch. There are very few spaces to park. So take the train. Since we’d gotten there late and that we knew the zoo closed at 7, we decided to go see only the big ticket items. Namely, the pandas!

Except that none of them were outside.

And one looked dead inside.

But really, he was just sleeping. All they do is eat and sleep. They don’t do much else.

While we were watching one of the pandas eat. He got up and turned around. His tail lifted up a little bit and I said, oh no. It’s gonna dooky. And guess what? He doodied. And you know, people were all surprised. I said it pretty loudly!

And as a side note, World Market sells a product that enables you to re-enact the scene that I saw.

We ended up skipping a lot of the exhibits indoors (like the reptiles). And though we had time left in the zoo to see things, most of the animals had gone into their night-time abodes and we couldn’t see them anyway.

They were all this fat. Who knew you can store up that much fat eating hay!

Also, if you go see the pandas, make sure to go up the trail some more and take a look at this really cute guy.

It’s a red panda! My telephoto lens tends to distort the colors a bit when its extended like that and gets that milky haze. But the red panda had a really great color. This reddish coppery color.

You can see a few more of these photos over at smugmug.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal

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Spy on Me

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:02:11 GMT

One of the other things that we did was go to the International Spy Museum. It cost us $18 per ticket. But if you can manage to get your ass up and to the museum before 8, you can get the ticket for $8. That just was not going to happen in my lifetime. Triple J lives like thirty minutes from DC, at least. Even longer by train.

So the spy museum told us all about spies, from the ancient times to now. Most of it centered on WWII. There were some spy equipment. A few cameras and hidden guns and whatnot from history and equipment to look at microdots. They even had a ventilation shaft that you could crawl through, but you know, that crap isn’t padded and my knees are not what they used to be. Plus, a thousand other little snotty children have crawled through those tunnels as well. So make sure to wash your hands before you touch your face after crawling through there.

A cute thing they do at the beginning of the museum is have you memorize your legend (i.e. your secret ID.) There were several to choose from including one for children. A while later, at a computer station, you’re asked who you are, how old, where you’re going and why. They then give you another set of info to remember and you do the same thing at the end of the museum. I found it relatively easy since it was multiple guess and an easy one at that. I was going to Russia to meet Oksana. And the options that I had to like Natasha and Sergei. Had it been a bunch of names that started with O, I might have had more trouble.

The most interesting thing I found was about Mata Hari. Apparantly, she wasn’t the master spy. She was originally an exotic dancer, who, due to her waning beauty, became a mistress to many powerful men. When the war came around, one side asked her to spy on the other, which she agreed to. Then the other side asked her to do the same. She agreed to that as well. But neither side gained any useful information about the other. She just took the money. But according to Wikipedia, which is true in all things, it seems that she wasn’t a spy at all. She was simply a scapegoat.

Overall, I enjoyed the spy museum, but it isn’t something that I think you have to see. If you’re only in DC for a few days, skip this one.

Oh, also, since we had time after the spy museum (we were there for 6 hours or so), we went across the street to the portrait gallery museum. We weren’t hungry yet, and it was as good as any to spend some time.

Totally skippable. It’s all portraits and photos of famous people. One of which was LL Cool J. He had this 12 foot portrait of himself on a throne-like chair that he had painted. He loaned it to the museum. Guess he was tired of looking at himself all day.

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal

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Natural History Museum

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:03:01 GMT

One of the many things that we did in DC was go to the museums. Most of the museums had extended holiday hours and the Natural History museum was one of those. So we went after lunch. (I think we went to Hard Times Cafe, which had delicious chili. Wish we had one here!)

The place is huge. We were there for about 7 hours and we still didn’t see everything. But to be fair, there was also a bajillion people there.

Here we are standing next to a giant squid. I’d always imagined that those things would be much much bigger, but I think that it’s the tentacles that make the length and not the body. Still, I was pretty excited to see it. (BTW, it was freezing there and we all wore scarves and jackets. But by the time we got inside the museum, it was hellaciously hot from the number of bodies. By the end of the day, when everyone else had left, the museum was actually pretty cold.)

There is like an ancient societies section in the museum. It goes from like the dawn of civilization to now and how tall you’d be on average. As you can see, Mr. J hasn’t quite reached adulthood yet.

The one thing that everybody seemed to be crowded around was the Hope Diamond. Now it’s not even all that big. From how everybody talks about it, I thought it’d be like as big as my head. But really, it’s like the size of a baby’s fist. It’s no bigger than that big sapphire Celine Dion wore for her Titanic song way back in the day. Still, it’s a pretty big rock, just not the overexaggerated size that I thought it was.

People were crowded around that thing like it was some magical thing. But I guess I’m just not that into that particular diamond. I wandered off to see the myriad of other gems that they had displayed. I especially like the totally ancient pieces from (I think) Marie Antoinette.

I enclose this with Chris being chomped on by a great white shark. He’s almost as big!

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal

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