ワシングトン第五番写真！

So the goal of my trip was to visit the Lincoln Memorial. It was a long walk in the heat, but I finally made it! its not quite as big as it looks when you are close up. The stairs are kind of small and steep.


There was some sort of gospel choir singing in front of the reflecting pool.


And here is the big man himself, Abraham Lincoln.



And this is what he looks at... every day since the 1920's. I'm think it'd be interesting to see a time lapse view from this perspective over the years. The years roll by, rallies come and go, but the overall scenery hasn't changed that much over time.


This particular day, this guy was cluttering the view.


I tried to get some nice angled shots w/ my zoom lens of the statue.


When I saw this one, all I could think about was Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear. While bored in a conference session i decided to reenact the scene

Next, I walked to the relatively new Korean War Memorial. Its already 10 years old, but that was after I moved away to San Francisco, so I had never been before:

The memorial is mainly comprised of 19 statues of soldiers on patrol.


To the left there is also a wall with photos etched into it. There are 2000 along the length of the wall. Some of these weren't very detailed so it was hard to really tell who or what they were of in some cases. But regardles... a little bit eerie.


The statues are in a triangular area, each one has a black stone bar in front of it on the ground, but its not exactly clear what these bars represent.


I'm not sure if you can tell from the photo or not, but I thought the quality of the sculptures in this memorial to be somewhat low (compared to other statues in other memorials nearby).


At the tip of the triangle is a reflection pool that has this etched above it.

Anyway, as a whole I was not very impressed with this memorial (as the son of a hypothetical Korean War Veteran). The new WWII one, while also not perfect is definitely better. regardless, this one lacks the power of the Vietnam memorial's striking design.


I took this one by balancing my camera on a anti-terrorist concrete divider wall and using the timer.


I have a few more pictures from the walk back and another visit to the Air and Space Museum. I'll have to prepare those tomorrow. I need to get up and go to the airport for my flight in San Francisco in only 4.5 hours!


ps - despite being overcast most of the time, and trying to stay in the shade anyway, I got a bit of sunburn（日焼！） from my 3 hour trek. :-(