Washington DC

Weekend in DC visiting the sites from picture books!

I traveled to DC for the weekend to stay with Janey, Terry's sister in law. On the saturday I spent the say in the centre of DC seeing all the sights! I started in the National Art Gallery and then did a long circuit around the mall. Walked up to the State Capitol then down the other side of the lawn. Had my picture taken in front of the Washington Monument - that stereotypical image of America. It was the windiest day EVER and so so cold! After that i headed to the American History museum for some lunch and felt like everyone was looking at me because i was by myself. If anything, this trip made me realize how much i want someone to share my experiences with because its not fun enjoying things by yourself. 

After that i walked up to the White House and around the outside of it. The actual house is way smaller than i expected! It is definitely no Buckingham Palace!! I then headed up to the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. It was all amazing and very cereal actually being stood in front of these monuments which i have studied for so long. 

That evening we went to the Kennedy Centre to watch a ballet performance. It was pretty special and lovely to experience. It was a recital which i had never experienced before. 

On the Sunday I went to Mount Vernon, George Washington's plantation and had a tour around his house and grounds. In the afternoon I mooched around the shops in Alexandria. It was comforting to hear so many British voices here. In Alabama I get over the top excited if I meet someone who is British (which has only happened twice) that i have not already met. In Alexandria every other group had an English accent in it and some of the shop owners were British. They even had mothers day things in the shops even though America doesn't have theirs until April! It was a beaut of a day and the Potomac River looked fabulous in the sunshine. 

On the monday I had a meeting with the photographic editor at the National Geographic Magazine in central DC. I felt very lucky to be able to have that opportunity and be shown around their offices and learn how everything functions. Overall DC was definitely a worth while trip and I seemed to pack in everything i wanted to do! I was very very tired in the week to come though because i had totally worn myself out.

Selma - Civil Rights Jubilee March

March 4th 2012 

March Over The Edmund Pettus Bridge

This was definitely a day i will remember for the rest of my life! It started very slowly and slightly traumatic. This was my birthday weekend and we had a tornado warning in Tuscaloosa on my actual birthday, therefore all my celebrations had to wait until the Saturday night. So the morning after I was a little worse for ware and was the only one insured to drive the car so we had to wait until the afternoon to drive to Selma. Five of us went on the trip, me, Anika, Angela, Amy and Sophie! None of us knew what to expect, all we knew was that a jubilee march was taking place across the Edmund Pettus bridge which had taken place every year since the march took place in the 60s. The atmosphere was very friendly and even though we were the extreme minority, no body seemed to be looking at us and we slowly just slid into the crowd. There were thousands of people congregating at the Martin Luther King Church to watch the pre march rally. We saw Martin Luther King III speak and Jessie Jackson which was amazing. Its a bit cereal to stand and watch these people speak in person when, for the last two years, I have been studying them through textbooks and journals in Leicester! 

The actual march took place after the rally and we walked the route that the original marchers took through down town Selma. The mixture of people that were there was pretty amazing. It was not just black people, there were white, young and old, Mexican, Asian, men and women. All people walking through the streets together. We turned the corner onto the straight road towards the Edmund Pettus Bridge and I nearly cried. It was a bit like being inside a history book. We walked up and over the bridge with everyone and spent a while taking in the atmosphere then walked back to the main street. There was a festival type celebration in the centre and it really felt like we were in a different country! The vivid images, I will remember forever. 

Atlanta - October 2011

I have been a bit lax with my blog over the last few months so I am going to continue on from where i left off. For Fall break in October, Anika and I had plans to go to the beach with a group of girls that had invited us along but unfortunately that fell through so we had to think of something else to do pretty swiftly because we found about not being able to go only two days before the start of the break! We were both very disappointed so we decided to do something just the two of us. Atlanta seemed to be somewhere we both wanted to go and turned out to be a great adventure. 

We rented a car and Ankia drove because i was still recovering from being in a car crash in Mississippi and wasn't quite ready to be behind a wheel just yet. The first impressions of Atlanta were very good! It was great driving up into the city with the high rise blocks all around (Tuscaloosa's buildings are very flat). When we arrived we had decided to go into the down town area and walk around for a bit before meeting Anika's family friends for dinner in Marietta. The only problem with this plan was that we are both students, therefore we never have cash on us and all the car parks were cash only. This was annoying but it got worse when Anika's iphone ran out of battery because we were using this as a gps! So all in all our first afternoon in Atlanta consisted of driving around for what seemed hours then sitting in starbucks charging Anikas phone for our journey to find where we were staying! 

The rest of the trip was great fun though! We did lots of touristy stuff like the behind the scenes tour of CNN, the Georgia Aquarium (biggest in the world), Martin Luther Kings historical center (birth place, Church etc) Little Five Points, The Olympic Park. I also had my first experience of the Cheese Cake Factory... AMAZING. I have never seen so many different flavors of cheesecake in one cabinet in my life! All in all it was a pretty amazing trip which we cobbled together at the last minute. So far this trip is my fourth state and my sixth city!

The Olympic Park

CNN - Very Cool!

They had five wale sharks swimming round in this tank, I felt quite sorry for them!