Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Monday, March 23, 2009

Einstein Memorial

We passed the Vietnam War Memorial on our way toward finding something to eat, and I snapped this picture of the Three Soldiers statue that stands near one of the sides of the Memorial:
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We stopped at a little sidewalk cafe and souvenir stand which obviously caters to the tourists on the Mall. We each had a little pre-made plastic-wrapped sandwich and a soda, and it wound up costing us about $16. We also got some refrigerator magnets for our respective mommies and I got a shot glass as one of my souvenirs of our visit. After we sat on their little outside patio and ate our sandwiches, we headed across Constitution Ave. to see the Einstein Memorial which is in front of the National Science Foundation. Here's a picture from across the street:
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When we actually got across the street, there was a family there at the monument, and their couple of little boys were clambering all over the statue. It looks like it's pretty much designed for that, and they weren't doing any damage or doing anything malicious, so I just sat down on one of the benches and waited for them to leave so I could take a couple of pictures.
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The monument itself is kind of interesting. The semicircular pattern at Einstein's feet is a star map, with all of the stars down to 4th magnitude indicated by little metallic tacks in the granite. If we didn't have quite a bit of other stuff to see and a short time to see it all, I might have stuck around this little monument longer and taken more time to look at the star map.

My parting picture:
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And then we were off to see if the crowds had thinned a little at the Vietnam War Memorial, and to see how far we could get before our legs gave out...

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