Me for Dictator!

Started early on my first morning in Washington.... 7am there aren't many tourists around the White House but there are some very strange characters like this man singing protest songs with a cardboard box on his head.

May I take your photo? I asked.

You MUST take my photo he growled in reply and began a new song with added vigour.

Then I headed towards the Washington Monument, closed to the public since 9/11, and down towards where I hoped to find the last signs of Washington's famous cherry blossom but somehow ended up on the wrong path and corralled into a fun run for diabetes.... which was somewhat unexpected but I did get pulled along in the slipstream for a while before managing to find a way through the barriers.

Next stops the Mall and Smithsonian museums, built with a bequest from a British man who had never been to the States and whose offer of funding was not very well received in Washington in the years after the British had burned it to the ground.... which was a theme that comes up a lot in the Museum of American History where I wandered around a series of explanations about the terrible things the British did... including sinking the Gunboat Philadelphia and as mothers read them out to their wide-eyed offspring I heard one plaintive voice say 'But, Mommy, I thought the British were our friends!'.

The museums were stunning and everything was SO BIG! But it was our cardboard box man and his assertion of his right to freedom of speech under the first amendment which captured the heart of my day in Washington.