Welcome to Washington

And so on Wednesday I arrived into Washington DC's grandiose Union station onboard an Amtrak train from New York to start the next leg of my summer. The trip itself was uneventful and I spent most of the time copying out by hand the numbers from my English mobile phone to my new fangled American cell phone (which hasn't a patch on my old-school English one). After arriving in DC I caught the Metro over to the George Washington University campus in the west of the city to sort out my accommodation, and after a brief bout of confusion over keys I ended up in my apartment for the next five weeks. It's only a few blocks from the White House in a quiet part of town, with a view that takes in the Washington Monument, and perhaps most importantly, possess both a Starbucks and Subway store in the basement.

After dropping my stuff off I walked across town and caught another Metro up to the Catholic University campus in the north of the town to sort out my student cards. Confusing we're Catholic University students, interning in Congress, living at George Washington University halls of residence. So we're spreading ourselves wide while here.

The sheer scale of so much in DC is overwhelming, not in the same way as New York as DC is a much more sedate city, but nothing is done by half. Of course, there's the Mall between the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and Congress, but even Catholic University got in on the act. It had one of those picture perfect campuses that I thought only existed on the front of prospectuses where the pavements were clean and the grass was green and uniform. All very nice but slightly too perfect. At the centre was the Basilica that I was told to orient myself by, but I wasn't quite prepared for the size of the thing.


Bearing in mind this was only part of a University campus you get some idea of how things are done here. No doubt there'll be more eye-opening sights to come.

Afterwards things got more mundane in buying bedding and unpacking all my things before finally meeting the other interns from England. These should be interesting weeks.