So long, farewell, adieu to D.C.
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So long, farewell, adieu to D.C.

By Debbie Tseng

Apologies to our dedicated readers for the delay of these posts! The internet connection was pretty shaky and I didn’t know if things were loading on the server, because they certainly weren’t loading on my laptop. I’m currently sitting at Dulles Airport, happily connected to their free wifi. Where have we been? The comprehensive list is as follows: Wednesday was our free morning/noon, and many of us went to see the monuments and memorials. In the afternoon, we headed over to the Department of Energy to talk with Steve Koonin, who actually was at Caltech to give a talk earlier during this term. The National Academy of Sciences was next, and there were equations carved into the floor: and where there was an amazing DNA staircase [extrapolate the double helix]…

and the equally amazing reflecting mirror.

Thursday was the busiest day, we woke up and had breakfast at 8 in order to get to NIH around 10:30. As Elaine wrote earlier, we met with Jim Battey who spoke to us about stem cell research and policy.

Group picture in front of the Supreme Court

The National Institutes of Health

After the NIH, we took the metro to the Metro Center for lunch, and then walked to AAAS for a meeting with Dan Poux and AAAS fellows who are Caltech alumni:

Off to the Pentagon! Five floors, five sections, five sides in a pentagon. Brilliant.

Dinner was on our own, so some of us ended up walking into Jaleo, an extremely popular Spanish restaurant and tapas bar. Might as well enjoy the last night in D.C., right?

Time to get daily exercise [as if we haven’t walked enough over the past week already]!

We walked to the Jefferson Memorial over the Potomac River:

You can probably tell that I went very camera-happy on this trip…

The entire D.C. area is beautiful, and though the monuments trick you by being so huge that it seems that they’re in line with each other and closer together than it seems, every trek was worth it.

As our Danish friends would say, farvel!

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