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SPECIAL REPORT: ++++++++++++++ Here's what I learned on my recent vacation to DC (late February) and my visit to my good buddy Mr. Baker in Baltimore. 1) I recently acquired a lovely bright yellow winter jacket from L.L. Bean. While this color is wildly popular here in NH (I can't walk down the street without seeing at least 5 or 6 people wearing a similar jacket), no one - No One - in D.C. or Baltimore is down with yellow. I might as well have been wearing a cowboy hat, sharkskin boots and a patch on my jean jacket that said "Out-Of-Towner: Please Accost Me." 2) And in fact, we were accosted by an inordinately high number of homeless weirdos. Our nation's capital is thronged with homeless. I've never understood this - if you're homeless anyway, why not just walk to Florida? Better to be homeless on the beach than sleeping on a sewer grate to keep warm. 3) Still, the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the homeless community. I give them credit - for every basic panhandler who sits and asks for change, there were 3 who were at least trying to provide a service or sell a product to get cash. We met a man who had a remarkable gift for unbroken speech - he was attempting to give us a tour of Washington by reciting facts and landmarks with the kind of gloriously impenetrable run-on sentences that would put any telemarketer to shame. It took five minutes to break away from him, and eventually we just had to start walking in the other direction while he kept yammering at us in the distance. A surprisingly young and attractive black man was also either homeless or just had too much free time on his hands, calling himself the "Smile Police" and trying to give us happy-face stickers in exchange for cash. 4) Squirrels are the only wildlife to speak of in D.C., and they have developed an overly friendly, almost aggressive attitude toward tourists likely adopted from the aforementioned homeless. They'll scurry down from the trees and sit within 2 feet of you, chattering spurious accusations and demanding tidbits of food. 5) The subways of D.C. are the cleanest, fastest, safest and nicest subways I have ever been on. Constructed of massive tunnels walled with giant waffle-shaped concrete and tastefully lit with track lighting, they were a pleasure to ride. Tough to beat rocketing underground through giant waffles. 6) I know the cherry blossoms are supposed to be lovely, but D.C. in the winter is cold, windy, and bleak. Nothing but granite, marble, asphalt and concrete in every direction. The city felt heavy. 7) The Vietnam War Memorial is far more moving than I imagined. It lists the name of every POW and American casualty of that war in chronological order by death (58,000 of them). Overwhelming, but I couldn't help but wonder what sort of wall would be built if they commemorated WWII in the same manner - it'd have to stretch from one end of the Mall to the other. Needless to say, we decided against checking out the Holocaust Museum after that one. 8) D.C. is truly an international city. Three out of every five people we saw spoke Japanese, German, Swedish, or especially Russian. Commie bastards are overrunning our nation's capital, snapping pictures and distributing propaganda. J. Edgar Hoover would have a stroke. 9) Being an international city, tensions sometimes run high. While resting against a short concrete wall abutting the sidewalk to check my map, I was ordered to keep moving by a officious little man who barked, "This is private property!" Upon moving away, I caught him checking out the place where I was leaning. I assumed the guy was some kind of self-important asshole or paranoid schizophrenic until I noticed that the wall was bordering the grounds of the Saudi Arabian Embassy. 10) Incidentally, we flew directly over NYC on the way down. That city is so damn cute from the air, I just wanted to stick it in my pocket and take it home. 11) Our second evening was spent in Baltimore, which recently tops my list of least favorite places to be. Part of this is due to my buddy Mr. Baker's incessant harping on the dangers of the city. Upon picking us up, he immediately regaled us with stories of muggings, shootings, crack dens and racial violence, all of which occurring within 2 blocks of his house. He mentioned that Baltimore is the fastest-shrinking city in the US, as people are bailing out of the downtown area and staying away in droves. Then he dropped us off near the waterfront and went to his graduate class for 4 hours. Great. We were fine, but visions of Trouble danced in my head all evening. I know it's more his fault than the city's, but I never once felt nervous walking the streets of NYC. I did in Baltimore. This is the city where "Homicide" is filmed, after all. I guess you can take the boy out of New Hampshire, but you can't take New Hampshire out of the boy. I was glad to get back to Portsmouth, where an attractive woman can walk down an alley at 3:00AM naked with $100 bills taped to her butt cheeks and the worst that will happen is she might stub her toe on one of the potted azaleas dotting the cobblestone walkways that wind casually through the alleys. 12) Regardless, we had a good time, even in Shady Baltimore - we ate in a cute little Italian place on the waterfront and were charmed by the kids skipping down the wharf to do drugs behind the concrete pylons at the end of the pier. A vacation is still a vacation, and it was fun. Maybe next time we'll hit Rome and see what that city has to offer. Heard there's a couple good cafes there, maybe even a historical site or two. |