6.08.2012 – 6.08.2012 
34 °C
After a nice tasty brekky (our own in our little hotel room) we headed out to see the Capital Building. We had booked in for a ten o’clock tour of the building. The Capital is the seat of the US Govt. It contains the House of Reps and the Senate and is the main law making institution in the US. Members of the House of Reps are elected every two years (can you imagine running a poll every two years?) but Members of the Senate are elected for six years (a third of which are elected every two years with the House of Reps). I think this is probably the foundation of why the Senate here in the US is stronger than the House of Reps, the Senators just have more time to learn the art of governing! Another main difference between the House of Reps and the Senate is that there are two Senators from each state (regardless of the state’s size) whereas the seats in the House of Reps are based on population of the state. For example, New York State has more elected House of Reps members than say Wyoming but Senate wise both states have two representatives. An interesting note is that until the mid 1900s the Senate representatives were not populated voted for! Members of the Senate were appointed to the position.
The building itself is fairly impressive but disappointingly the tour we took did not take us into either houses of parliament! What sort of tour of a govt building doesn’t include entry into the main chambers??? Obviously, the Capital tour in DC! The tour instead takes you thru the crypt (yep originally the Presidents were all going to be interred under the Capital.. this never occurred.) and under the main rotunda (third largest dome in the world behind St Peters and St Pauls). The artwork around the rotunda is impressive and tells the story of America’s history (well at least up to the 20th C). The only other thing of note on the tour were a hundred or so marble busts of famous people from the US (most of which were previous presidents). Apparently each state can nominate have two marble busts on show at any one time.
Non-US citizens can obtain access to the Houses of Parliament by applying for separate tickets (US citizens need to see their elected representatives). The Senate is closed at the moment so we weren’t able to go and have a look but the House of Reps was open to the public so we went and had a sit in the public gallery. Being summer, there wasn’t anything happening in the House so without anyone to give you an idea of what you were looking at we stayed for a little while before heading out. I wasn’t able to take pickies (no electronics of any kind into the Houses) so I’ll try and describe the room to everyone… Its not too hard! Think our lower house and you are sort of close! No green seats and carpet though! All Blue! All of the seats face towards one end of the house where the speaker sits. No tables for the representatives just leather chairs. Similar size to our house, similar design just different colours. Actually the only other difference that I noticed was that our house has the Speaker sitting at one end of a long rectangular chamber. The speaker in the US House sits in the middle of a rectangular room but his chair is in the middle of the long side of the chamber. If you think that our speaker sits at North than the speaker in the House sits at East facing West.
To be really honest, I think all three of us were a bit disappointed with the Capital building. The tour really didn’t explain much about the governance of the USA so we walked out of the building with a few questions still sitting in our minds.
From the Capital building we jumped onto a Big Red Bus so that we could get down to the other end of the Mall and show M the Lincoln memorial (because she didn’t Segway yesterday she missed out on the main sites). It was pretty warm on board the bus so we didn’t probably enjoy the outside experience as much as you could but it was still a pleasant way to make our way down to the memorial.
One of the stops after the Washington Memorial was to this hotel on the southern side of the mall, as our tummy’s were rumbling we decided to get off and see if we could find ourselves something to munch on. We actually managed to find an underground food court (mainly for the employees who work in surrounding office buildings) regardless, our Turkish inspired lunch was tasty and it was blessedly cool in doors!
We concluded our bus tour down at the Lincoln Memorial where we also had a look at the Korean War Memorial (one I hadn’t seen the previous day). It has been very tastefully done because it is sculptures of soldiers in different poses surrounded by low bushes. Something a bit nicer than just a wall and a list of the dead people’s names..
After a long hot day out and about we decided to settle for a cold drink and a burger at the corner shop. Probably not the healthiest but definitely tasty after a long tiring day!
Song of the Day– Fat Boy Slim, Right here, right now!