Travelogue: Washington, D.C

The nation’s capital also qualifies as its strangest city. Beyond the ceremonial precincts, the arbitrary quirk of height restrictions results in a fabric that feels more European than American, as the well-behaved street wall rests in a consistent line behind a row of trees. L’Enfant may have been a French rationalist, but the over-wide avenues, suspiciously orderly foliage, and bizarre roundabouts-with-traffic-lights make the city feel more like nineteenth-century Barcelona with its cut-corner intersections, equally a pedestrian death-trap, than Paris. In a supreme gesture of irony the baroque diagonals, lacking the Sixtus or Haussman monuments, only render the landscape more confusing. Terrain this hilly really doesn’t serve for a vista anyway – especially when it gets urban security grafted onto it.

Past the street, it’s stranger still. So much of this town is itinerant – from sojourner media to short-term staffers – that the population (at least the part with choices,) skews young and glazed-over, yet strangely lacking in sartorial consciousness. The foreign well-to-do brush shoulders with the foreign here-to-stay in a mix that seems combustible to one from the land of segregation, yet apparently accepted as normal in this made-up, unreal zone of statelessness. Life seems to be a strange blur of metal detectors and inebriation.

No points at all for the convoluted pay-at-exit subway (if you run out of money, do you stay in the tunnel?) Huge points for what must be North America’s largest concentration of Ethiopian cuisine, and the beef isn’t bad either. For a town this size, I’d expect a little more of a party scene, but suburbia may be more the speed of most of the permanent residents.

Here is the modern city without the skyscraper, and it feels good.