Washington D.C. Day Two...

After an all you can eat breakfast buffet in the hotel we rolled out of the doors and headed to the Washington Smithsonian Zoo. It wasn't too far away from the hotel and the best part was, it's free!

These very grand lions guard the entrance to the zoo. It wasn't the nicest of days weather wise, it was very muggy and overcast, so we were walking around everywhere at a snail's pace but it was nice to be slowly strolling round the zoo on a Sunday morning.

Washington Zoo is famous for, and very proud of it's Pandas. A few years ago they had the new arrival of Tai Shan ('Friendly Mountain' in Chinese) a very cute baby Panda. Tai Shan is now a little bigger and a lot sleepier...

Here's what he was up to - he was sleeping on top of the air conditioning vent with his legs up in the air.

There were lots of beautiful animals in the zoo, but for some reason it didn't feel quite right - I think Jersey Zoo has raised the bar so so high now that all other zoos just feel a bit mean. I expect the weather had something to do with it too, zoos are always feel a bit strange when it's cloudy - especially when there are animals that should be roaming around Africa in a small area of the zoo on an overcast day.

The elephants looked amazing, but it was a bit upsetting seeing on of them swaying backwards and forwards - none of them were really moving much (apart from the chap smiling at the front of the photo who was munching away on some grass). Their house was being renovated, so hopefully they'll have lots of room and lots of toys to play with when it's finished.

We walked all the way to other side of the zoo where there was a little farmyard section. There were some hairy pigs and some cows and some architypal red farmyard buildings. We also saw Abi's long-lost Llama relative...

I think the Llama has stolen Abi's hair style (and leg warmers!).

After the zoo we headed to an area called U Street (or a street called U Street), which Abi had found on her Not For Tourists app on her phone. U Street has a lot of different shops along it, but the reason we went was because there was supposedly a really good cake shop there called Cake Love. Unfortunately it was closed on Sunday, but the Love Cafe was open, so we went there and had ourselves a cupcake...

The cakes were OK, but we thought again that we're in the right city for cakes as Crumbs Cakes are absolutely delicious.

A little further down the road from the Love Cafe was Ben's Chilli Bowl...

We'd both heard about it on t'interweb as being a good place to go, and as you can see from the sign it's a 'Washington Landmark' - it looked like it was heaving inside, so we didn't go in (and we were still really full from breakfast and our cakes). The signage was really similar to some of the places along the boardwalk at Coney Island, that old fashioned hand painted look. It was great. They also had a very friendly looking bear outside...

The buildings around U Street were lovely, infact a lot of the smaller buildings in Washington a really attrative old town looking houses with loads of character. The owners have painted their houses very individual colours which gives them even more character, different areas of Washington seemed to have different coloured houses. Capitol Hill had bright but more subtle colours like blues, reds and greens whereas U Street had brighter, bolder colours like blue and orange and yellow.

After walking along U Street for a bit we hailed a cab and made one last tourist stop before heading back to the hotel, there was one more building that I was dying to see...

The Capitol Building.
It looks so grand and powerful and remarkably like it belongs in London - I think they stole our style for a lot of the buildings in Washington, although they look quite Greek too, so we probably stole their style... anyway. It felt very imposing and important and it was great to see where Congress is held.

Again, it was eerily quiet around the Capitol Building park, we walked around (very slowly) looking at some of the other buildings which admittedly all looked the same, like this very bright white building...

It was boiling hot and at this point really sunny, so it was a bit painful to look at the building as the sun was reflecting off all the white marble. I had a little rest on the steps before being told off because someone (Miss Turner) started lying down on the steps and was asked to sit up. Apparently you're allowed to sit on the steps but not lie back on them...?

After mooching around the Capitol Building it was pretty much time for us to go back to the hotel and get our bags before heading to New York again, but there was one final stop we had to make...