Thursday

We made our first foray into the District on Tuesday. That's when I timed the Metro ride down the orange line to Smithsonian at twenty-two minutes. I was unable to time the walk from our unit to the East Falls Church stop, though--my watch was under too many layers. It was so cold that my cheeks started hurting acutely about halfway there. Once we arrived, we had to take off our gloves to use the fare machines, and I started timing. We waited on the platform for about seventeen minutes before the train finally came. The platform was outside. I remained cold until well past the Foggy Bottom stop on the way to L'Enfant Plaza, where we picked up the red line to Mt. Vernon Square to meet our friend Holly, just back from Honduras. That's just one more stop north from Chinatown. We decided to eat at the local brewery that day, where they had pretty good black and tans, but terrible rum and Cokes. After dinner, we attempted the same transit in reverse, but we boarded the right train heading the wrong way when we changed lines again at L'Enfant. We seem to have zoned out or something, because realization hit us both the moment the train started to move out of Stadium-Armory station, five stops in the wrong direction from where we'd started. This is the sort of thing that happens to new people in the city, and we had really only been here one day at this point. We both felt kind of dumb standing in east DC's Minnesota Avenue stop waiting frigidly for the return train. Minnesota Avenue platform is outside. It was very cold out there, too, but we had the bumbling warmth of slapstick subway mistakes to keep us warm. [Cavin]