DC! DC! DC!

As most of you know, I went to Washington, DC over the President's Day weekend. It was the first time I've ever been to the East Coast (besides Florida) and I'm glad that Moni invited us over. Here's a recap of my trip:

Friday Nite - Departure from Long Beach to Dulles Airport
One thing I love about e-tickets is the ability to perform self check-in, especially when the line is freaking-A long. Security checkpoint wasn't much better either. We waited in line for more than 30 minutes; the line just kept going on forever! Even worse, the flight was delayed for more than 40 minutes! *Argh* One good thing was that although the flight was delayed, we actually arrived to DC on-time! Yay for strong tail winds!!!

Saturday - Washington, DC
It was still dark and cold when we arrived in DC; it was barely past 5AM. I was soo excited at finally arriving in DC that I wasn't even sleepy. I wanted to go sighteseeing right away! But alas, we had party poopers in our party...everyone wanted to go to sleep! BOOOOOOOOO!! HEHEHE (^_^) Thus, we went back to Moni's place and slept for a few hours. Let me say that I was very disappointed that there wasn't any snow! It had all melted during the week...*sigh* So, needless to say, I was very ecstatic when I awoke to see tiny snowflakes fluttering to the ground!!! Good thing I saw it just in time cause it didn't last long...*phew*

Moni took us around and we saw the White House, Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, statue of Einstein, Capitol Building, Washington Monument, and World War II Memorial (the last three from afar).

Any interesting stories? Yes...*drum roll*...we ate ice cream! Yep, we ate ice cream as it was 20 degrees with wind chills. Smart, huh? The story behind this: we were walking along and we saw a piece of uneaten ice cream sandwich. It was lying on the ground, unmelted. Jacks had once said that if one ate cold stuff when it was cold, the body wouldn't feel as cold anymore. Something to do with the body temperature being warmer than the outside temperature. So we decided to test this out. Jacks, I STILL FELT COLD, DAMNIT!! EATING THE ICE CREAM BAR MADE IT WORSE!! x_X

What else? Hmm...I desecrated the Washington Memorial. Well, since the WA Memorial is in the form of an elongated cylinder, it reminded me of something (we'll just leave it at that). So I posed for several pictures of me licking the memorial. BWHAHAHAHA. It was funny at the time, but maybe it was wrong in retrospect. Oh well, what's done is done...(but I personally still think it was creative).

At nite, we went to eat at Baci Vini + Locanda, an Italian restaurant. It is what its website describes: "a restaurant born of passion." You can check out the restaurant by going to http://www.bacivini.com/.

Afterwards, we went to a club just down the street called Chloe. Let me tell you, I was wearing a cardigan, jacket, leg warmers, jeans, scarf, and gloves AND I still felt the wind blowing through every nook and cranny on my body. Brrrrrrr. It could also be that I wore open-toed heels to clubbing. BWHAHAHA. XÞ Since we got there early (around 10-ish), there were only a handful of people loitering about. However, as the night progressed, the place was PACKED. I thought the clubbers were predominantly Caucasians, but Moni said that the club was very Asian. I do have to say that the Asians in DC are definitely taller than the Asians in LA! What's up with that?!?! Music was good in the beginning, but around midnight it started to go downhill from there. Sequence of types of music played: hip hop --> whitey --> 80's --> techno --> hip hop. But by the time the second round of hip hop is played, the club is about to close down. So for 2 hours, we have to suffer through head-bobbing, heart-pounding music.

Sunday - Countdown till departure to Cali
We were all beat from the previous night, so we did things at a leisurely pace. We had lunch with Moni's brother, sister-in-law, and their 2 kids at an Indian restaurant. D00d, the kids are sooooooo cute!! Made me want to have kids too!

As we were driving to the airport, I noticed that there was only ONE road to get to/from the Dulles airport. This made getting to the airport much faster as this separates airport and rush hour traffic. However, if you get on this road by accident, there aren't any exits until you've arrived at the airport.

One bad thing out of all this was the return flight home. *UGH* Before takeoff, the pilot announced that due to heavy head winds, we'll be making an unscheduled fuel stop at Phoenix, AZ. WTH! Yes, I didn't want to encounter low fuelage, but are JetBlue planes THAT much smaller than other airlines' planes? So we didn't end up taking at Long Beach until after 10pm, which was 1.6 hours after the scheduled arrival time. Man, it was such a looooong flight. Jacks' flight left an hour after ours BUT she arrived in SD before us PLUS she didn't have to make any stops! Grrrrrrrrr!! But at least I didn't have a seatmate that was obese, nor who had an infant. Poor Yo. She had to sit next to this obese guy that took up her arm rest, so she couldn't change the DirectTv channels until he moved his arm out of the way.

Although I was glad to leave the ass-freezing cold behind, I felt like the days past by too quickly. I would definitely come back to visit again...this time during spring though. I hear that the cherry blossoms are pretty during April! That means I don't have to fly to Japan to seem them anymore! YAY!!