Megan's Adventures: U.S. Botanic Garden and the National Gallery of Art

Sorry I haven't blogged in a long time. I have been busy doing my job here at the International Guest House. This blog is going to be about my day off on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 (I know that seems like a long time ago). I went to the U.S. Botanic Garden again to take pictures. The first time I went there I forgot to take my camera and I wanted to take pictures of many things. The U.S. Botanic Garden has different rooms with different plants in each room. The rooms each have a different name. When I entered the U.S. Botanic Garden, I was in the Garden Court. The other rooms that I went to were the Jungle (a tropical rain forest area), Southern Exposure (plants native to the Southern states and Mexico), Rare and Endangered Species, the West Gallery (display about Plants and Culture), Plant Exploration, Orchids, Medicinal Plants, World Deserts (desert plants), Hawaii (plants from Hawaii), Garden Primeval (ferns and other ancient plants), Plant Adaptations and the East Gallery (there was a display of how plants work in this room). In the Jungle Area you can go upstairs and do the canopy walk. It is just walking around the top and you are able to look down at the jungle.

Also, I took a picture of the National Museum of the American Indian. I had visited this museum before and wanted to take a picture of it for all of you to see. Next, I went to the National Gallery of Art. I spent a decent of amount of time in this building looking at Galleries 1 to 51, which were in the West Building. There are security guards in each gallery watching your every move that you make. Some of the security guards were being loud and talking on their cell phones. I did not think that was very nice as people were trying to focus on the art. The pictures in the different galleries were very interesting. However, I began to get tired of looking at art (because there were so many to look at). I looked at art from 13th to 15th Century Italian, 16th Century Italian and Spanish, 17th Century Italian, Spanish, and French and 18th Century Italian, 15th to 16th Century Netherlandish and German and 17th Century Dutch and Flemish. I did not look at all of the galleries in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. Then, I took the underground walkway to the East Building and ate lunch at the Cascade Cafe. After lunch, I looked at some of the galleries in the East Building. I think that you need more than one day to go through the National Gallery of Art because there is just so much to see.

I had thought about going to the National Air and Space Museum, but I was really tired and wanted to go back to the International Guest House (IGH). There are some pictures that I took during my day off on Sept. 17, 2008. The pictures are not in chronological order. I may post more pictures from this time on another blog post.