Newseum

Hi everybody! I had quite a good weekend. Our time is DC is starting to run short, so there has been a flurry of museum and site seeing amongst us interns. I have been pretty good about going out to see things this entire time, and have seen at least one new thing every weekend that I have been here. So I don’t feel a huge amount of pressure, but I still want to see all that I can. I did go to one of the coolest museums I have ever seen this weekend though. We all went to see the “Newseum” first thing on Saturday morning. Unlike the other museums in DC, this one charged $20 per person. Though pricey, it was incredibly worth it. The best way to describe what’s in it is to think of all the random artifacts you can think of that have a place in news history. More than likely it will be there. They had sections of the Berlin Wall, the Unabomber’s cabin (yes, the actual re-assembled cabin), Daniel Pearl (American journalist killed by terrorists)’s laptop, a door from the Watergate hotel, J. Edgar’s Hoover’s desk, Timothy McVeigh’s driver’s license, and the antenna from the top of the World Trade Center, just to name a few. I also got my picture taken with a cutout of John Dillinger. I almost wanted to have a notebook with me to write down all the wonderful little odds and ends that were around every corner. It was gut-wrenching (all the 9/11 displays) to fascinating (newspapers from the beginning of the press to present), to hilarious (displays of media satirists, like SNL and Colbert). We ended up spending 4 hours in the museum, and left after seeing the final display of all the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs since it began in 1942. Some pictures broke my heart, but were worth seeing all in one place. The coolest thing was how recognizable everything was. Everything in the news is such an inherent part of life that many of the images were very familiar, but had been years since I’d seen them. Recently forgotten news stories, like the DC Snipers (the museum had their actual blue sedan), or the Unabomber, or even the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit home with me. My whole experience walking through was like, “Oh hey, I remember when that happened…” If any of you come to DC, the Newseum is a must-see, particularly for fellow news junkies (Becky).
On Sunday, I walked all the way to the Holocaust museum, got in line, got a ticket, and then decided I had seen too many sad pictures of people from the day before. So I just turned around and went home. Maybe next weekend I will go back and check it out when I feel a little better about humanity.

I did have one moment today that made me realize how much I miss the lack of people in Wyoming. I was walking to Union Station and a giant dragonfly landed right by my foot. I really wanted to lean over and catch it, but couldn’t because there were so many people around. That kind of sucked. However, I had a great weekend and am ready for work tomorrow (sort of).