A Tour of the Capitol

On Wednesday morning we rode the courtesy bus in to Union Station, then walked over to the Capitol – a lovely walk through some tree-lined streets -- and on to the Longworth House Office Building where our representative has his office. The office staff graciously arranged a tour for us with an intern, a young lady from Cameroon (Africa) who was a student at SUNY Buffalo (she was working at the office for a semester for 15 hours credit toward her degree in Political Science and International Relations.)

We were able to go to the Capitol Rotunda, where Clara stood on a spot that was allegedly the geographical center of the District of Columbia, and to briefly enter both the Senate and the House chambers. In the Senate, Thad Cochran of Mississippi was holding forth on the virtues of a nominee for Appellate Court District #5 – to an otherwise completely empty chamber -- while in the House, a few New England Congressmen were voicing their support of a section of a bill granting funds for American Heritage projects in their respective states – to an otherwise completely empty chamber. Photography was prohibited throughout most of the Capitol Building, except for the Rotunda where we also saw a statue of MLK, whom our intern described as "the only Native American whose statue was in the Capitol" (hmmm . . . apparently schools in Cameroon teach a different sort of American history, or nomenclature at least!)

We did get to go through the tunnel from the Office building to the Capitol and to ride the train back, which was quite nice as it was raining cats and dogs outside.

Afterwards we went through another tunnel over to the Madison Building of the Library of Congress for lunch, and then to the Jefferson Building of the LOC. Fantastic place, where they collect all of the significant publications from within our country – one source said "over 300 million books on 530 miles of shelves," (a completely unbelievable pairing of numbers requiring 100 books per foot of shelf space!) while another had a somewhat smaller number – as well as other types of collections, including a Bob Hope exhibit.