Email From America, Four: Wonderful Washington.

 

I wasn’t expecting to like DC. The best I’d imagined was that it would be dull – I’d been told to expect a rather uneventful city without a buzz, inhabited almost entirely by state administrators – while the worst was that in the late days of the most turbulent Presidential election of modern times, the atmosphere would be somewhat, well … turbulent. 

I could not have been more wrong.  

Washington DC is a splendid city.  Its people are friendly and unthreatening, its transport system is simple, clean and inexpensive. I love its tree lined avenues, dripping in autumnal colour, and reminding me of the suburbs of my own home town. I love its tall 19^th Century terraces, its quiet wine bars and its restaurants – all of which look well above my price range but add an ambience to the city streets at night that makes it feel gently hip and relaxed. I love the historic monuments, the magnificent museums, and the cleanliness of the sidewalks, the languid bends of its rivers: the mighty Potomac, stretching below highways and bridges in a wide, lake-like body of cool blue, all the way to West Virginia; the brief, thin thread of the Anacostia, winding down from Maryland … the snow-white rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial, the gorgeous ponds and pools, starlings and squirrels, the heron I watched standing sentry on an island of reeds, the felty reds and smoky ochres of the elms and beeches peppering the parks and verges near the White House.

My explorations of the city have only begun. Awed by its most famous sights, I was surprised to find that the free-to-enter Smithsonian Museum complex incorporates vastly more sites than can be ventured into on a single visit. The Museum of African American History and Culture is both gruelling and uplifting; the Holocaust Memorial Museum an acutely painful and vital testament to human evil and suffering. Both leave one immensely moved, the trivial concerns of everyday life shunted into sharp perspective. A week ago, if you had asked me to name the greatest art galleries in the world, I would have chosen Britain's National Gallery, the Paris Louvre, and New York's Metropolitan. Now, Washington DC's National Gallery of Art joins that list. Yesterday I toured the West Wing, with its tremendous medieval exhibitions, its French Impressionists and its British, Dutch and American greats and more. Today, the modern and experimental East Wing awaits.

Walking DC's tree-lined streets at night, I feel safe. Entering a church early on a Sunday morning, its choir rehearsing in the wings, I am made to feel welcome. This is a city that survived a Civil War and came out of it transformed into a major capital. It is a city that has accommodated forty six Presidents and their families, and will very soon accommodate a forty seventh.  It is a city for everyone. It is a city I have come to love.