Capitol/Pentagon Visit

Today we visited the Capitol Building and the Pentagon. Visiting the Capitol was interesting and pretty cool, although it was something I'd seen before, and I'm more looking forward to when we get to go back while both the Senate and House are in session and sit in the gallery. Thanks to Senator Carl Levin we have both Senate and House gallery passes.

Visiting the Pentagon was an altogether different experience, and I quite enjoyed it. We arrived a bit early, so we walked over to the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. It's one of the most interesting/unique memorials I've seen in DC, and probably one of my favorites. The guard there told us that it lights up at night and looks even better, so hopefully I'll get a chance to see that. I'll try and get a picture of it up on the blog and talk more about it then.

The picture to the right is of me at the Pentagon, standing in front of the Department of Defense press podium. Okay, so it's not actualy the DoD press podium, it's a replica, but still pretty cool anyways. The Pentagon tour was quite impressive. When you walk in the visitors entrance the first thing you see is the Guardian Angel. The Guardian Angel is a military person who stands atop the staircase, overlooking a tunnel into the Pentagon, dressed in military green jumpsuit and carrying an assault rifle. Not the guy you want to mess with.

We received a tour from a Marine and a Navy Seaman. They gave the entire tour while walking backwards (so they could make eye contact with us) and only turned around to go up or down stairs. Probably the most surprising and interesting thing I learned was about 9/11. They told us about how the building is constructed, and how they had just about completed renovations on the side that was hit. Because renovations were not done, most of that side of the Pentagon was empty. Also, the structure had been reinforced with steel and kevlar (same thing they use to make bulletproof vests and all) among other things. 184 people died when that plane hit the Pentagon, but they estimate that had it hit any other side it would have crashed through one side, gone through the courtyard and impacted a second side of the Pentagon, killing over 12,000 people. Wow.