Instead of my usual hotel breakfast, I did the East Coast thing and
went to Dunkin Donuts. I walked north like a salmon swimming upstream
against a current of commuters. I saw Russia House, thus answering
someone's question: Did the Russia House still exist? Alas, by the time
I saw it, I had forgotten who'd asked the question.
Needing more caffeine, I asked Foursquare to tell me about nearby coffee. One thing led to another, and I was soon scarfing down an omelet at The Diner, a 24-hour diner. It was good, but I somewhat regretted having this second breakfast as I continued waddling north.
A specialized device: telemetric dummy kori bustard egg. To find out how to
incubate kori bustard eggs, zookeepers would replace a newly-laid egg with a
highly-instrumented artificial egg.
It had temperature and orientation sensors, plus power, microprocessor
and an antenna to transmit data to a computer.
Some folks looked at pandas.
The room with all the panda-camera-monitoring screens was the
Giant Panda Behavior Research Station. I thought "They should
call it the Pandopticon" and thought I was so very clever until I
searched the internet and saw other folks had already thought of it.
I happily walked around the zoo for a few hours. Then the sun burned through the fog and drizzle and I unhappily sought out shade and air conditioning.
The place I thought of as the "elephant barn" was actually the
Elephant Community Center.
It had a display of training tools: a Target (brightly-colored ball on a stick)
and a Pointer (a blunt metal rod). No sharp hooked ankus. Maybe that elephant
trainer lore about ankus-necessity is a myth.
The sun kept burning down. I gave up on zoo-walking; if I kept it up, I was going to keel over from the heat.
I left the zoo and had a tasty late lunch at Open City. Then hopped on the metro to find a tourist attraction that was inside out of the sun.
There was a display of art by folks from Turquoise Mountain, an organization that trained folks in Afghanistan regional arts. If I'd researched and planned better, I could have timed my visit to see an artist working right there in the museum. As it was, there was a big space (large enough to accommodate an artisan and many neck-craners) with some pretty carved wood barriers.
There was more Asian art on other floors, but not much compared to what I was used to (maybe because I lived near the Pacific?).
Tuesday: Navy Museum, Hirshhorn, American Indian, Natural History ![[^]](../../../images/next.gif){kind=small}