I haven't been the the US purely for personal reasons for quite some time. The last time was probably on our round-the-world trip, and interestingly our first stop was in Washington DC.
I've just flown across to Dulles, to help my sone get settled into his exchange university. I always love seeing the crazy elevator bus transport system that I haven't yet seen anywhere else in the world.
It's like you're in some strange parallel universe where this kind of futuristic system became widespread, back in the day.
What I like less about Dulles is the immigration queue. We were the last of a group of flights, it seems, and had the joy of gradually seeing the queue reduce over 90 minutes until a shift change at 6pm meant there were even fewer agents to help. Death by a thousand immigration stamps.
When we eventually got through, we headed into DC on the Metro.
We started on the Silver line, which took about 50 minutes into DC.
And we changed at the beautiful Metro Center to take the Red line to Union Station.
We walked from there back to our hotel - which I'd chosen as it was a short walk to Union Station for our train to Baltimore the following day.
It was a Yotel, which felt a lot like a Citizen M.
After checking in we headed back out to an Irish Pub we'd passed on the way.
My son has gone back to not being allowed to drink - he's just 20 - but frankly this isn't a concern for him at all. He finds it quite funny.
I'm doing what I can to compensate, though.
Walking back to the hotel we realized how close our hotel was from the Capitol.
I've always said that I love being jet-lagged as it lets you see things in the place you're visiting that you wouldn't otherwise. If you're not encumbered by work or social considerations - like being awake and functional at a certain time - it's like having a strange, privileged window into a life you wouldn't see.
So after being awake at 4am and not being able to get back to sleep, at 6am I headed on out to the Capitol to experience it at dawn.
It was really strange being in the spot of the hyper-televised January 6th attack, although without anyone else around.
I wandered around to the other side, as I saw it was had the morning light hitting it.
Heading around the corner I saw something very strange. There seemed to be a full state funeral taking place! Had I missed something in the news?
I ended up asking a police officer about the situation. She kindly explained that it was just a drill: every so often they go through the full motions of a full state funeral, so that they're ready when one happens. I was happy to hear the coffin was empty (or full of a representative amount of sand, perhaps?).
Once we were up and about we headed to Union Station to take our train to Baltimore. I'd forgotten how painful train travel is in the US. You have to queue just to be allowed onto the platform to take the train. The rest of the world considers this a solved problem, honestly.
On arriving in Baltimore's Penn Station we hopped on the Silver line up Charles Street to get to the Charles and East 33rd Street stop. My son will be studying at Johns Hopkins University for the coming academic year, on an exchange from his home university of EPFL.
We got settled into his "right next to campus" accommodation, which seems very comfortable.
We'd been warned that we would need to bring - or buy - our own bedding, so I'd gone online and had some shipped so he wouldn't be on a bare mattress for the first day or so. As I couldn't send it to his hall of residence before he was checked in, I had it send to a nearby UPS Access Point, which was a very interesting walk away.
Once this had been taken care of we could visit the campus.
It's really a lovely campus.
With lots of old trees.
I think he'll have an amazing experience here.
We popped into the Barnes and Noble, which seems to gradually transforming itself from being a bookshop to selling JHU merchandise. How about that for a statement on the shift in our society?
In case you're wondering, no, I didn't buy this T-shirt.
I have managed to organize one work-related meeting, while I'm here, with someone from the International Arts + Mind Lab at JHU. Other than that the coming days will mostly be about picking up the extras that are always needed when you move into student accommodation. Fun times!
Leave a Reply