July 4th at the Capitol- Take 2.

My senior year of high school I went on a church mission trip on which we were scheduled to be in D.C. for the Fourth of July, and we were. But there was a monsoon in the middle of the day that sent us all into the Smithsonians for refuge and by the time we made it out, some members of the group (adults) were griping so much that we returned to the place we were staying without catching the independence day celebration. Lame.

This year, I was determined to celebrate the 4th in style. No inclament weather was going to stand in my way.

Problem #1- I woke up late. The parade was scheduled to start at 12 noon, so I knew when Sarah and I didn't wake up til 11:10 that we weren't going to make it. I gave up on that dream without pause, knowing that the fireworks show would make up for it. We eventually got around and were ready to head out. We met up with some friends in Georgetown for a light lunch (Mexican, again, although not nearly as divine) and headed to the capitol.

I had read online (yea, my work day is hard) that there is a flower from Africa called the titan corpus that blooms like every four years in D.C. and it happened to be blooming this week. I convinced Sarah that we needed to see it, so we headed to the botanical gardens near the House. The metro was eerily quiet to be a July 4th holiday in D.C., which sort of freaked us out. Think empty airport at Christmas.

We found the flower. It was pretty cool, I'm not going to lie. It was supposed to smell like a rotting body, but thank goodness it had closed up a little and wasn't as rank as we expected. It was VERY large. It was over five feet tall and had grown like 4 of those feet in the past 6 days. Incredible.

Then we headed off to explore. We got the info on the evening celebration from a few of the capitol police and went to check out the folklife festival on the mall. It was interesting for sure. There was a Hare Krisna following there with lots of dancers, yoga, storytelling, and free food. It sort of infuriated me that on our nation's capitol, on the celebration of our country's anniversary, a pagan religion was worshipping their pagan gods. Our country was founded on one God, and he did not come to earth in the shape of a balding old man who requires men to wear skirts and everyone to paint their faces. I was not happy.

We kept moving to find a dragon dance from Asia, which was very cool. We met up with Stuart and kept walking to run in to an Irish folk celebration, complete with bag pipes and dancers. Just as the music was picking up and I was tapping my foot, a hairy police man interrupted us on the loud speaker to inform us that dangerous weather was imminent and the federal government was implementing "Operation Safe Haven". This included evacuating the mall and taking shelter from the tornado warnings in a nearby building, which for us meant the basement of the Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art. Nice. We spent the next hour and a half there, with a million other smelly, damp, tourists and their 3 million kids. Ew.

Finally, we escaped the power-tripping guard and braved the sprinkles to find the nearest metro, or something to eat. We found L'Enfant Plaza and luckily a mall in the basement of this ritzy hotel. We had an early dinner and decided to wait out the storm.

Fast forward through getting lost (again) and waiting out a HUGE line to get on the Capitol lawn and enjoy the celebration. I've never seen so many people in my life as I did when I got through security and on to the lawn. If I looked one direction, I saw the Washington Monument in the background of a huge stage with all the stars: Tony Danza, Little Richard (yes, he sand Good Golly Miss Molly), an actress from the broadway show Chicago who's name I cannot remember, Dierks Bentley, and Elliot Yamin. If I turned around, immediately behind me was the beautiful capitol building set on a gorgeous July sunset. The scenery doesn't get better.

The fireworks... I cannot describe how amazing they were. The Washington orchestra was playing beautiful patriotic music while the show was going on. I've never felt so patriotic before. I honestly got chill bumps on a sulty summer night in a huge crowd of people. It was breath-taking. I will never look at July 4th or fireworks the same way again. I was instantly in love with everyone around me. It's as if euphoria set in and convinced me that everyone there, since they were citizens of this great nation, must be genuinely sound people with perfect judgement and a gratitude for the rights that have been afforded them. Silly, I know, but it was refreshing to think, if only for a few moments, the mankind is good and America is perfect.

My night only got better from there. We went out to Lauriol Plaza again and I'm so blessed to have made friends here. They are young, and trustworthy, and in the same boat as me, which is the best part. Luckily, all of us want to live in D.C. someday, so maybe if I actually get the chance to move out here someday, they will be around too. YaY!