outside the beltway

The District of Columbia is a very different place than Columbia, MD, Arlington, VA, Richmond, VA, Los Angelos, CA, or New York City, New York. And its the most interesting thing to hear what people think of DC even though their experience is based on miserable tourist trips with a vehicle (remember METRO, use the METRO outside travelers!!! It's the city's not so well kept secret). I've only heard two positive things about my beautiful dear and lovely city that I call home while talking to other fellow Americans. I heard from them: great culture, arts, museums, theaters, dining, and concerts. And then I hear them speak miserly of the traffic, the people they hate, the beltway bandits, politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, and again the people they hate.

Thanks for making me feel welcome. And I'm sorry they have such a limited view of what the city has to offer. Surely if they were standing on the wrong side of the escalator at Metro Center and got run over by a stampede of harried commuters, they might've found the lack of apologies intolerable. Surely if they were in traffic and found when they turned their blinker on to merge, it seemed everyone sped up. Perhaps when they were starving, they nearly collapsed waiting in line at the McDonald's, or when they planned a trip to the monuments, they were unhappy to find themselves emptying the contents of their bookbag to the security guards. Well I don't know if any of these things happened to them.

But surely I think they would change their mind if they saw what I saw. Beautiful weekday afternoons hiking along Mather Gorge (or better climbing in Mather Gorge), biking along the Mt Vernon trail (laughing at the traffic), the down-to-earth people chilling at the Red Room (Black Cat), rockin' out at the 9:30 Club, hanging out with our neighbors at the local bar--only a block away, taking a stroll in Dupont on a Sunday morning, reading the paper at Teaism, getting a recommendation for a painter from a Reverend at the Rhode Island Home Depot, admiring fresh vegetables at the farmer's market, seeing a friend unexpectedly while walking around the block, the transexual prostitute who asks me how I'm doing when I step out of my building to go to work at 4:30 AM, and frankly the cure-all to all the city's woes: a gin martini from Zaytinya's exquisite bar (or any of the other notable DC bar). So my DC readers, tell these people who think we're cynics because we have "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" on our license plates why they are just as cynical for thinking our lovely built-on-a-swamp city is a crap hole.