Happy Christmas Eve! Since I’m in the US until New Year, I thought I’d post this ‘lost blog’ from 25 years ago. It was my second-ever visit to the States, and the first time I kept a diary…
Day 1. Wednesday 31st March 1999.
My mum and I were given a lift to Paddington Station by my dad and my two sisters. We caught a very nice train with a T.V. in it to Heathrow airport. Then we caught a Virgin plane to Washington DC. On the plane it was wonderful, there was a T.V. and games console on the back of every seat! I watched the Rugrats movie and played a lot of games. It took a while to be immigrated but when we had got all our luggage we saw our friend Sharon and drove home. I watched The Simpsons then went to bed.
Day 2. Thursday 1st April 1999.
Today we went to the Smithsonian ‘Air and Space Museum’. We saw lots of planes and space rockets and we saw two movies called ‘To Fly’ and ‘Cosmic Voyage’. These are special movies because the screen is so big you feel you are actually there, as you can’t see anything else. These are called IMAX films. The Smithsonian is actually a block of 16 museums and a zoo, but 2 of these are in New York. The museums range from the ‘Air and Space’ to the ‘Portrait Gallery’, the ‘Natural History’ to ‘American History’. After that we went home, watched The Simpsons, had tea and went to bed.
Day 3. Friday 2nd April 1999.
Today we woke up at 6:30 so we could go to the White House, where all the presidents of America live. The current one is William Jefferson Clinton, the forty-second president. You get free tickets for the White House, mine is stuck in the yellow section of this book. We got a guided tour and I bought a book all about the different presidents. After that we went to have lunch in an ice-cream parlor in the museum of American history. As entrance to museums is free, we didn’t look at the exhibits, we went straight on to the Natural History Museum\Museum of Man. We saw dinosaur bones and a real life tarantula eat a beetle. After that we went home, watched The Simpsons (one of them was a Treehouse of Horror!) and went into the car again at 7:00. This was so we could see America’s famous buildings in the dark. We saw Abraham Lincoln’s (the sixteenth president) memorial. It’s like a temple with a statue of him in. Then we saw the Vietnam memorial, which is a big wall with the names of the people who died in the Vietnam war inscribed on it. Then we drove back home and went to bed.
Day 4. Saturday 3rd April 1999.
This morning we woke up at about 7:30. I had breakfast, an egg and a roll, and then at 10:00 we went to the zoo. I saw lots of things, like giraffes sitting down, kangaroos with babies in their pouches, a gorilla family and birds. But, my favourite animal was definitely the panda bear who was eating bamboo. I also saw an exhibit about teaching chimpanzees a language, and I spotted a mistake. They were teaching it numbers and they had written down: 0 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 8 9 instead of: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. When I told the man in charge of the exhibit about it he said he knew but he said I was the only one to spot it in 3 years and he gave me two free magazines. When we got back we were quite busy because Sharon had invited her mum (Pat,) her dad (Leo,) and her brother (Paul) to dinner. We talked about alot of interesting things, and they left at 9:30. If they came at 6:00, that’s 3 and a half hours. Luckily The Simpsons wasn’t on on the weekend so I went straight to bed.
Day 5. Sunday 4th April 1999.
On Sunday I woke up at about 6:30, but because they had moved the clocks forward it was now 7:30. My mum gave me an easter egg and then we drove to the train station. It was very big and fancy and we got on a train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It took about 2 hours to get there. When we got there we met Roger and Lily-Ann, my grandmas cousins. We drove to downtown Philadelphia and had lunch in a fairly posh restaurant. Then we went to the Franklin Institute, which is like a science museum. It’s really fun, I saw another IMAX film, mysteries of Egypt. I also had my picture drawn by a robot, I saw a robot playing basketball and I went inside a huge heart, which is quite dark. In Philadelphia, I also saw Independence hall and Liberty bell. When the train arrived back in Washington D.C., I had supper in a pizza restaurant, drove back to Sharon’s flat then went to sleep.
Day 6. Monday 5th April 1999.
I woke up at about half-past 7 on Monday, the first thing we did was to get tickets for the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, then we walked around the tidal basin a big man-made lake. We saw the cherry blossoms in full bloom, and we also went to the Jefferson memorial. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the U.S.A., was the one who gained independence from Britain. After that, we went to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, where they make all of the money in the U.S.A. and most of the stamps. I actually saw the old $10,000 note! After that we had lunch at the Holocaust museum and then we saw a very moving exhibit about German Jewish children. After that Sharon and I rented a paddle boat while my mum went to an art gallery. We had alot of fun and when mum had paddled for an hour, we went home, watched The Simpsons and went to bed for a wonderful night’s sleep!
Day 7. Tuesday 6th April 1999.
This morning we got on the train to go to Capitol Hill. Sharon wasn’t with us because she had to go to work. We queued for 4 hours because the line moved ever so slowly, l……….. i…….. k…….. e……. t……… h…. i……….s! When we finally got in the tour guide showed us lots of things including the whispering chamber, where you whisper into the floor and people hear you across the room. We also saw the place where President Clinton was on trial. After that we had lunch in a restaurant near the capital. I had a cheeseburger and french fries. We went home, I saw most of The Simpsons, (but I missed a bit of the first one,) then we went to the Queen Bee, a Vietnamese restaurant. I didn’t have any food, but my mum and Sharon did. Then we went home and I went to bed.
