It's Raining on Washington*

Red Baron likes Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story and likes to be in America, as the lyrics say. When Elisabeth and I arrived in Washington, the government was shut down, with it, the most important attractions and museums.
*Borrowing and translating the 1975 movie title: Il pleut sur Santiago

On our first day, we walked from the hotel near Dupont Circle through a magnificent park to Georgetown. I showed Elisabeth the Kennedy Center and the Watergate complex at the waterfront, memories of times long past. Next, we went to the Mall, which, being a National Park, was closed although accessible. It was deserted except for an occasional tourist or jogger, while the useless streets along the Smithsonian Museums were barred.

The deserted Mall

The National Gallery of Art is closed during the shutdown of the Federal Government.

The National Gallery of Art extends its compliments to Le Louvre

As a memento, the earthquake-shattered and bandaged Washington Monument pointed into gray skies.

The umbrella was a must.

The following day we had rain that occasionally changed from drizzle to downpours. So we spent most of the time on the sightseeing bus driving around the Nation's Capital, talking to some lost co-passengers: Brazilians, Russians, and Australians.

The famous Washington fire station, taken through the fogged window of the Big Bus

With the open upper deck and all the National Monuments closed, the Big Bus Tours had, on the occasion, considerably thinned out their schedule such that we were deprived of circling around the Pentagon with a visit to a shopping center of the same name. So we wound up our tour of the city at the Union Station instead, where we boosted our morale with a freshly prepared quiche and pastrami-with-onion sandwich.

At the Union Station's food court

Back at the hotel, I took a photo of the rain-soaked street with all traffic lights on no-go red.

When they eventually turned green, people still had little hope, hastening by with their umbrellas open.

Let me finish this blog with an Ol' Blue Eyes medley: 

It's very nice to go trav'ling,
However, not to London, Paris, and Rome, but
To New York, the city that doesn't sleep, where I never get any sleep either,
To my kind of town, Chicago is,
To Madison, where I feel snug among friends,
But it's so much nicer
Yes, it's so much nicer to come home.

*