DC Part 1

Saturday, November 1-Sunday, November 2
If you follow my mother's blog, this is the same post... exactly, except for this sentence.
Okay, so I promised that I would do this... so I'll start it... this will have to be a continuing thing.
So, on Saturday, the twelve of us who were going, met w/ Mr. Alexander(adviser going with us) and Mr. and Mrs. Ford(Vice principal and wife, they drove the suburbans). It was exciting, and we were all chatting up a storm of course. We went through security (which of course I had no idea I would have to repeat EVERY time we went into a building in DC), and we waited to board the plane. We flew to Denver, had a layover, and then went on to DC. I had a window seat and I saw the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building as we flew it at around 9:59 DC time. We checked into our first rooms before the actual program started, and we stayed up WAY too late. The next morning I had my first experience w/ the metro. Here is a picture of what the escalator looked like, I'm probably just over halfway down at this point.
Anyway, it was huge. After we purchased our passes we got a group picture, it's not the greatest quality, but it will have to do.












I'll start in the top left. Taylor (my roommate), Mr. Alexander, Hayden, Morgan, you can kinda see David's big poofy hair by Morgan... I'll post a picture of him later, Matt and WAY over there is Steve. second row is me, Liz, Katelyn, Hailey, then Candace.
Our stop was Rosslyn on the blue and orange line, we stayed at the Keybridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia.

Our first stop was Arlington National Cemetery. It was amazing. We saw the changing of the guard, Kennedy's grave, and of course a million other things like the burial place for the astronauts on the Challenger, etc. Here are a couple of pictures to show you some of the things I saw.


This is just the sign w/ Matt and Steve hiding behind it.








This is just to show the massive amounts of graves everywhere, I can't even describe how many there were.









This is a ship's mast, I can't remember exactly which one it is, I took a picture that said it's name somewhere. But it is a grave site for all who died on that ship.





That is me, on a sweet stone chair. this is where they hold official
funerals that you see on TV when they bury someone here I think... I'm not 100% positive...









This is the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He walked in perfect timing back and forth...









This is the tomb... every war since WWI I think they have put a soldier whose identity is unknown in this tomb.







This is where they walk... they are so precise that it wears their footprints in the carpet and cement!!







This is the tribute to the Mormon Battalion.




I really do have a lot more pictures; however, if you want to see any specific pictures, you can ask me, and I'll see if I have them.

After that we went to the Holocaust Museum. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of that, but rest assured that it was amazing. They did a phenomenal job of portraying the horrible things that were done in those concentration camps.


After the Holocaust Museum we ate and then went to the old, old, HUGE post office. Inside it has been turned into sort of a food and shopping place, but on the tenth floor it has a lot of really old, really huge bells, and there is a looking point up at the top on the tower that isn't in the picture where you could overlook DC. Here is a picture of the outside of the building. It really is super massive. We went to the top and got an excellent view of DC... but I didn't take pictures... I did from the top of the Washington Monument, but that is for another day.

That night we started the actual Close-Up program. I met my other roommate Shemijah, who we called Shem. I don't have a picture of her, so just imagine Emily Osment (Hannah Montana's best friend) and you can imagine her. After a fabulous dinner (we had McDonald's for Breakfast, but it was kinda cool, because the McDonald's building was there stories high, and our lunch was kinda gross, it was just pizza at a little shack place across from the Washington Monument), we went to the Iwo Jima (sp?) monument. As workshops 1 and 2 rode on our bus (I was in workshop two), our program instructors told us to look out the window. We did, and it looked like the soldiers were rasing the flag. It was all about angles, but it was really cool. I thought it was a great monument to start off the program. It was night so the pix aren't great, but here are a couple.