Incas of Emergency

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.

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.

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:

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:

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

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.

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

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,

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

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

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?

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And lastly, the famed Dupont Circle,

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.

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