Hirshhorn Museum

Yesterday, I took a mental health day and visited Washington D.C. After weeks holed up in my apartment doing work, I felt the need to experience a new culture for a day. As I normally do when I visit D.C., I took the Metro straight to the Smithsonian stop. I love the National Mall for two reasons in particular:

1. It's a national park that actually looks lived in; people run and play football but somehow it still feels like sacred ground.
2. Standing on the Mall, you have the opportunity to visit museums of all types, for free. It's like a museum buffet!

For this visit, I chose to stop at the Hirshhorn museum, one of my favorites. The Hirshhorn focuses on contemporary art and sculpture. They put together fabulous exhibits and the current exhibit is no exception. I spent two hours watching and listening to "The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image. Part 1: Dreams." According to the Hirshhorn's website, the exhibit "addresses film's ability to transport us out of our everyday lives and into a dream world." That description, while a bit bland, is scarily accurate.

The exhibit is so dark at points that wandering through its twisting hallways is both frightening and disorienting. Combine that with video installations splashing brightly onto walls and the exhibit is both shocking and memorable.

I don't know how to describe it other than to say that it is a must-see. Odd but incredibly interesting.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

One of the things that I have enjoyed greatly since moving to Richmond is the city's proximity to the free museums of Washington DC. Ever since my Mother made me skip my school's 8th grade trip to DC, I've wanted to see the Holocaust Museum. I had always heard about how moving the museum was, and am a true believer in the idea that by learning about the past we can avoid making those same mistakes in the future. The Holocaust Museum may not be fun, but I think that it is our duty to understand what happened and to use that knowledge in our own lives.

I walked away from the museum with two thoughts:
1. The curators of this museum have done an amazing job at weaving together video, artifacts and texts.
2. I still cannot imagine what the Nazi regime must have been like for those who lived it

On the one hand, the Holocaust Museum was truly well done. The time you spend in the museum's permanent exhibit is a journey from the beginning of the war to the end, and does a nice job of showing how seemingly insignificant changes came together to create genocide. On the other hand, I was disturbed by the number of middle school aged kids who looked bored or were making fun of the exhibit.

I stepped over stones that were used to pave an actual Jewish ghetto. I walked through one of the rail cars that was actually used to transport people to concentration camps. And yet, while I can connect the stories told at the museum to my own life and future, I can't say that I truly understand what that must have been like. Standing alone in a rail car in an air conditioned museum, it is hard to understand what it must have been like to be sandwiched in with 100 frightened and tired people people, travelling 30 miles an hour day after day in the middle of a freezing winter.

It was a wake up call to realize that for many of the teenagers at the Holocaust Museum, this trip was nothing more than another chance to prove ones coolness by putting others down.

Washington DC: Epsilon Delta Mu Style

This Saturday was spent wandering around DC with some friends from my sorority. While DC isn't in Richmond, I consider it my duty to point out to all non-Richmonders how close we live to the nation's capital. Friends from New York take note: I do not live in the deep south. Seriously.

When Emma and I were both working in Chicago last summer we became incredibly addicted to Potbelly Sandwich Works and would go there at least once a week -- each of us choosing the same sub every time. Potbelly's is Chicago's own amazing sub shop, and it has been one of the greater sadnesses of life in Richmond that I cannot get a roast beef sub that is so good it's mood-improving, all for about $4.00. Needless to say, after meeting Emma and Aileen at Metro Center, our first stop was Potbelly's.

After choosing to eat outside on the windiest day of the summer - we did get plenty of exercise chasing our meals' waxed paper around the block - the three of us decided to walk around the mall and the surrounding area. The first thing on our sightseeing tour was the White House. After seeing many movies where the White House is lit with dramatic skies or zoomed in on in an almost threatening way, I have to admit that it looked a bit plain in person. Or at least, plainer than I had envisioned. Sure the house was huge and beautiful, but it truly does seem like a house. Not really a government building where the head of state works. While the house itself was slightly underwhelming, the masses of protesters were not.

Next on our stop was the mall. We started at the World War II memorial, saw the Lincoln Memorial (I am preferential to this one, having grown up in the Land of Lincoln), and then walked through the whole mall, where they were setting up the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and holding the World Children's Festival. The Folklife Festival looked awesome -- I may have to go back to DC to tour it again once it's open. The picture of the truck that I've included is actually part of an exhibit. The Children's Festival, on the other hand, looked pretty lame. Other than the fact that they were building an amazing representation of the United States in Lego's, the festival looked like it had attracted about 20 kids to one small tent with two performers. By far the best thing that happened to us on the mall was the college kid offering free hugs, who advertised with a large poster.

After spending some time getting cultured (and sunburned) on the mall, we moved the party to the house of one of our sisters who just finished her freshman year at Kenyon. She lives in DC close to Silver Spring in a beautiful house. The evening that followed was filled with an amazing dinner of pasta, salad and pie; punch so good that made our EDM punch seem even grosser than it always has; and imaginary rides on the Thorne's baby-blue Vespa.