spent an awesome fall day [fall! fall! it actually feels like fall here!] yesterday capitalizing on the awesomeness that is free museums and free national museums at that!

Kevin and I had lunch at the Sculpture Garden and then spent the afternoon wandering around the massive National Gallery of Art. And, since we live here, we picked out a few wings that we wanted to see and wandered through those as opposed to spending hours and hours in the building trying to see everything a la traveling in Europe style.

Suffice it to say, I picked the mid- late- 19th early 20th Century French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Expressionist area. Van Gogh! Gauguin! Rousseau! Toulouse-Lautrec! Renoir! Manet! Monet! Degas!

I will hold off on complaints about people because I have gotten fairly good at ignoring everyone and am I’m trying not to project how I experience things onto others, especially because I hate when that is done to me. But I will say that there was this man (who bumped into me numerous times) who walked up to every painting with a camcorder, took a picture, walked to the next, took a picture. He would get so in there to the point that twice he put his camera directly in front of my face and took pictures. It was weird because he didn’t even look at the paintings in real life. I find that strange.

There was also this funny (re: annoying) couple with a child who when in front of the three Van Gogh paintings, the woman with child stood beside the first painting with her partner standing a ways away to take her picture. Stood there for two minutes, then side stepped to the next painting, cleared everyone out of the way, took the picture, side stepped to the next panting, physically pushed everyone out of the way, and took the picture. The whole process took the better part of 10 minutes, which on a busy Sunday is not very courteous or respectful to those other people wanting to see the paintings or who were already seeing the paintings and were haphazardly pushed out of the way. The funny thing was, the couple were not malicious and keep these really naive grins plastered to their faces the whole time. It was somewhat creepy. I don’t think they understood that everyone hated them.