Arlington National Cemetery

Hello people! I also had a pretty good weekend I haven’t written about yet! I went out to Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday. I had gone out there for the Fourth of July but didn’t get much of a chance to visit the whole place. It was brutally hot (I think I sweated out half my body weight in the first few minutes), but was still worth it. I went with a couple of the other interns, and we went to see all there is. Besides seeing
the rows and rows of white tombstones, we went into the Arlington House (Robert E. Lee’s house), JFK, RFK and Jackie’s graves, the Eternal Flame, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (and managed to catch the changing of the guard!) and the various memorials. It was pretty cool and pretty touching. The next day, I went back to the National Gallery (you’re right Jeff, I am starting to run out of museums!) to do some drawing. You can learn a lot about famous artists’ techniques by sketching their work. So that is what I like to do when their stuff is nearby. I grab my sketchbook, some pens or charcoal and my iPod and find a place to draw. I found a whole room of Degas’ models of horses and ballerinas, and drew a lot of those. Its kind of weird drawing in public places, though. People either watch me over my shoulder, or totally steer clear of me and what I’m drawing. I have noticed a new phenomenon here that I never experienced in Paris though. People will come up, look at what I’m drawing, and then go stand directly in front of me and what I’m looking at. I’m not sure if they want me to draw their portrait, or what. I usually just give them snake eyes until they move. The problem with the Gallery though, is there aren’t a lot of places to sit, and drawing while standing is pretty hard. But, I asked the security guards if I could sit on the floor and they said I could. I couldn’t really tell if they were irritated or amused by this, but I think it was more the latter. Either way, I had an awesome time and want to keep doing that on my Sunday afternoons, too. Oh, and I got this sweet picture of a bird taking a bath in a fountain,