Roadtrip USA East Coast Eighth Day (05 May 2024)

KG: Last night was catastrophic - between 3:00 and 5:30 a.m. the holiday guests in the apartment above kept us awake by trampling around the whole time until they were finally picked up by a taxi.

While Andreas is still making preparations for his concert visit, I set off to see the sights.

I first pass the imposing main station. Like almost all public buildings in DC, the station is intended to demonstrate the importance of the USA through its massive columns. Inside, a dance group is preparing Tiktok and/or YouTube videos.

Unfortunately, it starts to rain as I leave the station, so I get completely wet and head to the National Gallery to warm up and dry off. I don't have time to take in the thousands of paintings and sculptures. So I focus on the paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Cranach and the Italian artists. In the meantime, my things dry and I walk to the Museum of Natural History. Luckily, the museums in DC are free.

Then the clouds move away and the sun comes out again. I walk to the Washington Monument (in honor of George Washington, the first president of the USA, which at that time consisted of far fewer states). From there I go on to the Lincoln Memorial, where Abraham Lincoln looks down on you. Thousands of other people had the same idea.

I'm starting to get hungry, so I grab a bad sandwich and walk to the White House. It's heavily guarded, but unfortunately the President wasn't there.

Tired, I head back home.

A: Translation from German to Chinese (easy) is written on the screen of my cell phone. I'm sitting with Kimi and a friend of his in a very small restaurant very close to the Capitol in DC. My English is simply not good enough for adequate communication. At least not when it comes to more specific questions that deviate from the basics. And so Google Translator is the most important tool for our second meeting ever. He and his friend are from China. At least in the case of the latter, I know that he is from Shanghai. We met at Hatsune Miku's Magical Mirai in Osaka in August 2023. In addition to the general topics that you talk about when meeting acquaintances, I ask him for information about how to get tickets to Magical Mirai. This concert series, the main event of Hatsune Miku's music festivals, which take place exclusively in Japan, is so popular that you have to apply for them via a special system on the Internet. You can only get these tickets with luck, at least if you come from overseas. Perhaps this meeting has given me a slightly greater opportunity to attend this series of events and see Hatsune Miku live in Tokyo soon. At the end of my time in Washington DC, I will be leaving believing that I have strengthened my international relationships with people outside of Germany.