Nia Benton's Blast from Washington D.C. (Day III).
Hey, I'm back for my report for Day 3. Today, after an early wakeup call and quick breakfast, we got on the buses with each group going in separate directions. Our group went to the "School Without Walls" location. This is a high school that uses the entire city as a class room to learn and function. I actually liked it; but the school's students that presented for us had such horrible public speaking skills and it took away from the...
...experience.
After our little visit, we went to the capitol to take a group picture. (Yes, I will share) It was alright, but a Chicago coat in D.C weather will burn you up! Soon after, we went into our groups and went into the House of Representative building to scope it out and look around. It was awesome, but one of our group members dislocated her leg somehow. I felt so sorry for her.
We went into the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum and had lunch. They let us also look all through the place and Jasmine dragged me around looking for the monkey in the space craft! She was absolutely disappointed that she didn't find him, and I tried to console her. It was still great and we got some great photo moments for everyone at Phoenix to see.
By the end of the day, I was totally exhausted. We went to the WWII
Memorial and it was so beautiful. I was so relaxed sitting there and reading my book in such a inspirational location. I was a bit confused for a while when walking down to the Lincoln Memorial because I kept trying to remember the movie Forest Gump. I tried so hard to remember what was missing and when I figured it out I was astonished. For the movie they actually drained the water from the memorial. Maybe that was all Hollywood effects but It made the walk to the Lincoln Memorial even longer than it actually was.
Later it was on to the Korean & Vietnam Memorials. When you think about how many people died as a number, it doesn’t feel like much. But when you actually put names to each one....it definitely means something kind of make you want to cry. We also had a discussion on if we agreed on the use of drones aircraft as an alternative to live soldiers is a good idea. It was a small debate, but it was to work us up for the larger debate in the evening. Once again the Lincoln memorial grabbed our attention. It was so huge and the view away from it was beautiful, it really makes a statement to the importance of mankind. I wonder if Obama will have a memorial some day…… Note….,Jasmine and I once again almost get left behind at the memorial, but "almost" is the key word. Upon recovery we proceeded to Pentagon City to have our dinner.
Later that night, we went into our workshops to discuss the "Bill to Law" process because we were doing a mock committee meeting. Literally, we acted just like the congressional committees in D.C act when they are working on the new bills to be passed. It was cool. We had lobby people making bothering us and making us offers and everyone had to vote on whether the to pass the bill to the representatives or not. It was set up very realistically and I had no complaints. At the conclusion, we met with our teachers to discuss what we were going to do tomorrow and that was our night. I'm exhausted from the day and am off to bed, Good Night Firebirds, Later!
