April 02, 2008

TSOTC: Photoblog!

This afternoon I avoided work by taking a long walk around the neighborhood I'm living in. I took a lot of photos until I got sidetracked into shoe shopping and fell in love with a pair of beautiful red El Naturalista pumps I really can't afford. I mean, I'm tempted to spend all my money on shoes here and then go back to California with no place to live and no money, since I've seen that work out so well for others in the past. Oh wait, it didn't.

Anyway, as I keep saying, I'm living in a great area. I was actually going to walk further around today, but spent a few hours just roaming my neighborhood taking pictures of shit.

This is the UC Washington Center building. I live on the top floor.

Study Center.jpg

We're toward the end of a series of streets known as "Embassy Row." Here's the other end. All of these row houses are the embassies. On the left, Greece, um, Sweden, I can't remember what else. On the right, Ireland, Trinidad and Tobago, Luxembourg, Egypt, and Togo.

EmbassyRow.jpg

They're all about the same size, which means Togo gets about as much embassy as Egypt does. I think they should be proportional either to landmass or population, so that Ireland would have a regular house and Luxembourg would be in a kiosk.

This monster is Turkey:

EmbassyRow2.jpg

Here's a super-artsy shot I took of some more stuff through the legs of the horse in the statue of some guy named Sheridan:

EmbassyRow3.jpg

Aaaaand the obligatory picture of my thumb, which probably is covering up something really interesting.

Thumb.jpg

Yeah, I'm not the best photographer. Anyway, I'm at the other end of Embassy Row, and I think my favorite thing down at my end is the Kazakh embassy. This is their official statue of a knight riding a winged jaguar. It was put up last year, and I have to think that its seriousness is in some kind of response to Borat.

Kazakhstan.jpg

I like to think that I live in the California embassy.

Center Upclose.jpg

But the blue sign barely visible in the lower left of this picture insists, with total inaccuracy, that the White House is located inside my apartment,

Whitehouse Sign 2.jpg

which is pretty much exactly where the arrow is pointing to.

Whitehouse Sign Upclose.jpg

We have a monument to Daniel Webster in the traffic circle right outside,

Webster.jpg

although when I first saw it I misread it as a Noah Webster monument and got all excited. We also are next to the Human Rights Campain building - see the equality flag on the roof?

HRCView.jpg

A hell of a lot of the really cool buildings around here are churches. This is the one Teddy Roosevelt used to worship at:

TR Church.jpg

The plaque to the right of the door reads: "On this site in 1976, a historic plaque was affixed to this building."

This is another cool old building which actually isn't a church. The city is full of this shit:

Old Rowhouse.jpg

And, here and there, really fantastic high-modernist and postmodern architecture as well, like this building, which is an economic something or other:

Modern Econ.jpg

with an interestingly deconstructed globe out front (representing, um, globalization?). Note: this is a candid bird, not a stunt bird.

Modern Globe.jpg

Finally, for your edification, a statue of a woman doing a poor job of covering her boobs:

Boobs.jpg

And one of Taras Shevchenko, the Bard of the Ukraine:

UkraineBard.jpg

I don't know if his work is really as great as all that -- perhaps you can judge for yourself:

UkraineBard2.jpg

And a man wearing his napkin on his head while he eats lunch, for reasons which I suspect are clear to him alone:

napkin.jpg

And lastly, the famed Dupont Circle,

Dupont.jpg

where there is a bookstore that has a bar in it, which is open all night. That is my kind of bookstore.

That's crap from about a five-block radius around my place. More substantive pictures when my film comes back from CVS, if it comes back from CVS. I'm going to get more selective about taking pictures, I think, although I'm currently feeling compelled to document everything, like our woefully expired elevator.

Elevator.jpg

Posted by katie at April 2, 2008 02:52 PM
Comments

Dude, I'm so there.

Or, well, I was there, for many years, but now I live in CA.

I know exactly where you live and I'm tickled that you're there, not buying red pumps.

But just BTW, all embassies are not the same size. From my illustrious high school career in Model United Nations, I've had the opportunity to visit many embassies (if you're dork enough to join Model U.N. in high school, it's best to be attending high school in the D.C. suburbs, so that you can zip over to embassies with ease). Consider the Peruvian embassy resembles the Turkish embassy, a former house (who lived in these mansions) with marble everywhere, and fresh cut flowers, and I believe strolling musicians. Then the Sudanese Embassy, which even in 1997 (pre-Darfur, just in the middle of the previous North vs. South, Christian-Animist vs. Muslim civil war) was in a run-down row house inbetween a Kinkos and a liquor store. I know this paragraph is low on grammatically acceptable sentences, but I just emerged from a 1 hour and 40 minute department meeting....

Yay! I'm so glad you're having fun!

Posted by: DelightfulFormerHousemate at April 2, 2008 05:37 PM

Pah, your elevator's license only expired in the last year. The one in my building was three years out of date. Apparently people complained to the management about it. So they took down the license from where it was posted in the elevator and put up a sign that says "License available for inspection upon request of management." That put an end to the complaints!

Posted by: MoltenBoron at April 2, 2008 06:17 PM

I think the Bard of the Ukraine looks pretty neat. There. I said it.

Also, pumps? Red pumps? My sister? I'm so confused.

Posted by: Dianna at April 4, 2008 01:49 PM
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