Friday, June 14, 2013

Day 3 - Washignton D.C.

    Welcome to Washington! Here you will experience art, airplanes, spacecrafts, history, the biggest church in America, teasing weather, and the world’s most accidental football game!
    Day 3 of our east coast trip was a long day full of great experiences, both big and small. We started out by visiting the Basilica of the National Shrine, where we got a guided tour by an old lady who quickly became a group favorite. This is huge church with a massive amount of shrines all dedicated to the Mother of Christ. The church was beautifully decorated and filled with a bunch of religious treasures, no matter what religion you follow (or if you don’t follow any at all), this masterpiece of a building is going to take your breath away.

     Our next stop was the Mall, where we were let lose to roam around in all the exciting museums freely! The mall offered a lot of different art museums, a museum for natural history, one for air and space history, and much, much more. I visited the air and space museum, which was filled with all sorts of flying machines from the very beginning of our history in the air. They had everything from spaceships to predator drones, and they offered insights in the different machines. It was a great experience to walk in through the door and be met by hundreds of huge airplanes and rockets hanging from the ceiling.
 
    After my visit at the museum, my fellow exchange students Dominic and Grazvydas took a small break outside the many museums in the park, under the shade of the trees. Here we played a small game of football. I bet it was a funny sight to see three Europeans trying to figure out how to throw a football. Our skills with the weirdly shaped ball might not be the best, but the feeling of playing an American sport in front of the Washington monument is one of the greatest feelings I have had in my life so far, it really makes you feel like you have become a part of the country, which is a feeling that not many get to experience.

     The next thing on the program was the Holocaust museum. This was quite an experience. I will admit that me and my group got completely lost in the building the first hour we were there, but after that we found our way up to the fourth floor, where the real exhibition began. We moved through years of history, and learned so much about not only how the Jews were hunted, but also how each and every country contributed to end the war. For me it was a great thing to see the efforts of my people back home (including my great-grandfather), be recognized in a country as great as America.

     Our next stop was dinner, and how that was needed. After a long day with a bunch of experiences the tummy needs to be refilled. It is not the dinner that is important however, but what happened afterwards. Continuing our game of football from earlier, six of us guys decided to play on the parking lot, yes, the parking lot. I know what you are thinking, “Those kids are crazy”, and you are probably right. Diego, Pedro, Grazvydas, Dominic, Woody, and I, started a nice little game on the parking lot….. This was not our best idea, which came to show when Diego threw a ball for Grazvydas, who was not paying attention at the time. The result, a football hitting a parking car….. Woops. After a short panic (and laugh) attack, we had the fortune of just being made fun of by the owner of the car, who then decided to play with us for a while. How lucky can we be?

    With a day as great as this there are no doubts that this was the right trip to choose. With great weather like this, great company, a team of great chaperones, a really nice busdriver, and a country as great as this, there is no way that this trip can go wrong. If the next days are just half as great as today, this trip is going to be the greatest trip that any exchange student could possibly go on!

Alexander Bering, Denmark - June 13th, 2013.

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