Washington, D.C 2013

I'm really glad mom and I decided to tag along with dad to DC. It was awesome.
We arrived Thursday afternoon, quite successfully. That night mom and I went to Chinatown and ate dinner with my friend Jessica, from high school. It was really nice to see her again and catch up. That was a lot of fun.
Friday morning mom and I set off for the zoo. It was cold and wet and rather miserable. To be honest, we were underwhelmed with it. 

I'm riding a Sloth Bear!

The bird house was outdated, but they did have this beautiful Macaw and a Kiwi too!

One of the special things about the National Zoo is that they have a pair of pandas! The first pair was given to Pat Nixon after Nixon's trip to China. They had just cut fresh bamboo for them when we arrived and we watched them rip off a chunk of stem, peel the green outer part and eat the inside. They also ate the leaves. There was this really nice elderly docent there that reminded me of you! She was answering the many questions asked by a cute little girl. She also showed us dry panda poop!

There's always someone in this chair observing everything the pandas do and taking notes.

Mom and her favorite, the Giant Anteater

These platforms and ropes are for the Orangutans to climb from one home to another. So I think once a day they let them choose to cross on the ropes. 

There was also a really nice marine life exhibit where we saw a beautiful Giant Octopus, a tank full of Nautilus, some Jellyfish and other things. It was in a pretty old basement though.
I was a little bummed by the time we left the zoo, but once we got to the Smithsonian everything was okay again. We spent the rest of the day in the Museum of Natural History, of course. We saw the Giant Squid in the Hall of Oceans, along with other cool stuff. They had a model of a Right Whale, they're so funny looking! The exhibit was really well done and the signs were fabulous and so was the next exhibit we went to, human evolution. It was really fun seeing all my friends from class last semester (my human ancestor friends). I got to see replicas of all the fossils and bones and finds that I learned about! It was a lot of fun.

The famous rotunda.

My favorite hominid: Australopithecus boisei, of the Robust Australopithecines, a dead end branch of human evolution.

Friday night we ate dinner with dad at the hotel and it was lovely. Dad's meeting was over so Saturday morning we took him back to the museum with us! The second time around we made it through the hall of bones, a forensic anthropology exhibit and the insect exhibit. We saw the dinosaurs, the prehistoric mammals, etc.

Diatryma! The gigantic flightless predatory bird that terrorized South America. We watched a show about it with Uncle Tom and Aunt Janet, remember? Soooooo cool!

Giant Ground Sloths! They're one of my favorites.

The insect exhibit was nifty as well. I'm recently quite fascinated by prehistoric mammals and I bought a book about it so I'm quite excited. It's too bad no one ever teaches a class about it.
DC was a lot of fun and we were surprisingly successful navigating the Metro system.
Miss you! Love you!
Kat