I'm too tired to compose a proper blog post, so instead I'm just going to list seven impressions of Washington, D.C.:
There's a vague menace to the whole place, partly due to the heavy overcast weather while I was there and partly due to the omnipresence of cops, security guards, uniformed soldiers, and the like.
Young people - even those who looked younger than me - dressed extremely well. Though admittedly not the very best sample, Whole Foods was teeming with bright young things in expensive-looking outfits. If anything, the men dressed a bit better than the women.
The streets are as congested as other big cities, but the drivers are much more aggressive, flouting red lights to continue turning left, squeezing between two occupied lanes of traffic to make a third, honking like a 100-strong flight of geese.
The business districts - around Dupont Circle, up and down Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues - seemed to be less overwhelmed with chain stores than many big cities. Starbucks were ubiquitous, of course, but other than that, the commerce was refreshingly local or at least regional.
I've never seen more black cars with black tinted windows - not just sedans and SUVs that might have been, say, government, but sports cars, station wagons, compacts... It must be the fashion there.
Freebies don't make up for facts: my hotel gave me a "free" cookie (rather good chocolate chip, warmed up in a little oven right at the check-in desk), but the concierge gave me terrible directions for getting to the Whole Foods that ended up being basically around the corner.
Similarly, fit and finish matters. My room ("boutique accommodations"!) was well designed and rather comfy, but the bathroom was a wreck. The bathroom wall had at least four separate sets of screw holes - how many towel rods and toilet paper holders have they tried? The bathtub drain - the whole unit, not just the plug - floated up and away when I started the shower; I had to hold it down with my foot. And the bottle opener was fixed to the bathroom counter with a simple black drywall screw.
Home is better, all in all.
