Week 2, part four

I've visited some amazing places over the last couple of days. Me and the other interns at the Navy musuem are lucky in the fact that we are genuinely finished by 4pm everyday and so can spend the evenings in town, enjoying the weather (which has improved dramatically in the last few days, and today hit 100 F/ 38 degrees Celsius.) In addition, the British interns spend Mondays doing fieldtrips around D.C, organised by the museum. Quite a few of the American interns also come with us, because they don't necessarily live near D.C, and to be honest, even if I was at home, and in London, there's always something to be seen!

One of my favourite parts of the American National history museum was the exhibitions on the Civil Right movement, from the Emancipation Proclaimation (1863) until the Civil Rights Act (1964). I studied the U.S Civil Rights movement at school (from the 1950s) and so it's great to be able to come here and see some phyiscal items of Martin Luther King Jr.'s, e.g a pocket watch he had engraved for a friend, frozen in time.  There are also highly sensitive items too, like shards of stained glass from the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church (Birmingham, Alabama, 1963) which killed four African American girls whilst they were in Sunday school.

On a more light-hearted note, there was also a cabinet full of contemporary objects, titled The Making of Modern America which contained items such as Elphaba's costume (2003) from the Broadway musical Wicked. I know my sister at least will appreciate this!

The exhibit on "The First Lady" was also interesting, because the concept of the First Lady/ Family etc. is not hereditary, nor is it an official position, yet it still has an incredible impact on the American mindset. A dress of Michelle Obama's was on display in the centre of the exhibit alongside 18th C. Chinaware belonging to Abigail Adams (wife of the 2nd President), it's like a celebrity cult, continuing to the modern day. Before the title "First Lady" was settled on, the juxtaposition "republican queen" was considered!

National museum of the American Indian

Another fanatastic museum is that of the American Indian. I think part of the reason I enjoyed it so much was because I knew so little to begin with, shamefully my knowledge of Native Americans was formerly limited to information gleamed from Disney's Pocahontas. Now however I feel much better informed having read about initial interaction between English colonists and Native Americans in Jamestown (Virginia) 1607, all the way up to the present-day customs of American Indians, like the "Day of the Dead"(1st-2nd November) which became All Saints'/ Souls' day under Christianity.

3 things that stood out to me from this museum;

1. The museum itself was established in a 1989 Act of Congress, to promote awareness of the history of American Indians, and their place in modern American society
2. Everything in the Quecha (an American Indian tribe) is divided into Paña and Iloq'e. Paña is dark, masculine and present, where as Iloq'e is light, feminine and associated with the things of the past. Neither concept much concerns the future, as time was seen very differently (see below).
3. From the Maidu Creation story, notice the blurring and continuity between the past and present which makes their perception of their own history so intriguing;

"Turtle dove down, was gone for;
 four days,
four years,
four hundred years.
Time isn't that important."

// "over-time chaos returned,
Returns.
And the lessons proved true,
Are true."

Week 2, part three

 

The above photo was taken a while ago. Since then it has been raining for days, monsoon-style. A few nights ago everyone's phones began to ring simultaneously, which was weird. It turned out to be an emergency weather alert, which continued from 3am until 6am (overriding "silent" and "meeting" settings) saying that several inches of rain were due in a very concerntrated region of the city.

 

 Thunder and lightning storms continued for hours, and although everyone told me it was nothing to worry about, I kept getting up and watching the pavements flood. The thunder was loud enough to wake me up, and the lightning illuminated the entire room, with the blinds closed. The good news is, there were no serious floods, just a lot of rain, unusual for this time of year.

 

Currently the weather varies between overcast and sunny intervals. The humidity is the main problem though, it hovers between 80-90%, meaning that the air feels heavy, and nothing dries, because water doesn't evaporate without a lot of effort (e.g. using a hairdryer to dry wet towels...). Seeing as Washington D.C was built on a swamp, the climare here is oddly tropical.

 

 

A lot of my posts have focused around cultural insights, thoughts, etc. I think I should talk a bit about other aspects of contemporary culture that I have witnessed. Me, some other interns, and their roomates decided to watch Sharknado a film so bad that it was good. Live sharks fall from the sky, tornados form in the Pacific (they form in the Atlantic in reality!) and people decide to leave houses (in which sharks clearly cannot enter) and enter streams where the sharks actually are. Oh, and sharks tend to live in salt water, not fresh water. The film negates science to show scenes of a woman in a bikini running along beaches, supposedly to outrun the sharks. Either way, the film was a great example of self-mocking modern American culture.

 

So this week I've seen the benefits of working on an active Naval base. Seeing people in official uniforms is cool, getting free ice cream (given out to everyone who works on the base "for morale") is even cooler. The best was listening to the cannon fire as part of the retirement ceremony for an Admiral. The number of cannon blasts (which made a booming noise that rebounded around the entire site) signifies the rank of the person retiring from service. It's something most civilians will never get to experience.

 

Interesting things I've learnt in the last few days;

1. In Washington D.C apartments cannot have more than 8 girls living in them without being inspected, due to concerns over illegal brothels. This explains the gender imbalance in all of the student/ intern housing here.

2. Americans call "crocodile clips" "alligator clips". I find this interesting because it's obviously the same concept as in England, with the teeth, but who adapted the concept first?

3. Squid is not Kosher because it doesn't have fins and scales. I guess this is obvious from the Old Testament, but I didn't put two and two together.