We got up early today as we were keen to see the holocaust museum. It is free but it is also the most popular museum in DC so you need to get there at stupid o' clock to get a ticket for a certain time of the day. We got there at 8:30 and by 9am the queue was enormous. We saw most of the museum quite quickly since a lot of it we knew already (history of the war etc). However we could understand why it is the most popular museum and it leaves you feeling quite strange. There was one particular section that effected us a lot. This might sound strainge but it was a room that had two big piles of shoes on either side of you as you walked through. They had been taken off the victims before they went into the gas chambers. We just stood looking at them in silence for over 5 minutes. I can't really explaing quite why we reacted as much as we did to this but it was a very moving moment.

We gathered our thoughts and headed to the American history museum. There was so much to see that we had to skim a lot of it and just concentrate on certain sections, such as the section on Lincoln and other presidents where we saw Lincoln's hat, suit and the emancipation proclomation which he has signed in order to free all slaves. Downstairs I went to see the inauguration dresses of the 1st ladies (including Martha Washington) and Ian went to the science section. Then we both went to the section about Edison. Here they had some of his original patents and sketches of the 1st lightbulb. Again I am risking the geek comment here but that was really cool.

After an hour or two there, we finished our day in the natural history museum. It is of course very similar to the one in London, just bigger and with slightly different stuff. The exhibition that drew the biggest crowd was the Hope Diamond. It is supposed to be the purest/clearest diamond in the world. But honestly, we were disappointed! It is tiny!! Well, it's bigger than mine but still, we were expecting something that was at least over an inch!

It was 5pm by this point and we had sat down for all of 10 minutes since we got up at 7am so it was definately time to head home. 3 museums in one day was a lot and there is only so much information that one mind can take in! More museums to pack in tomorrow so after a chat with Alex and Karyn and a play session with Banjo, we headed for a well earned sleep.