This week I went to Washington, DC with CenSSIS for the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center Annual Meeting. Thursday was the Student Leadership Retreat, along with other closed meetings and general sessions. Three of us went down Wednesday night and met some of the faculty and staff who were there to attend the workshops on Wednesday.
Thursday when the sessions were over at five, we took the metro into the city and saw the Christmas trees at the White House. There was one decorated for each state. We got there after the lighting ceremony and formal program, since we didn't have tickets, and it was just as people were leaving from that. It was fun to walk around and see all of the different trees.
Janae, Martina & I
The trees were ordered alphabetically, we entered right next to Nevada, and the next was, New Hampshire, so I obviously needed a picture of that.
Every tree had the same clear globes hung on it but they were filled with different things on each tree New Hampshire's were pewter (my guess from only getting w/in 2 feet of it) landscapes suspended in the middle of the globes.
Here you can actually see what's in the globes.
My favorite tree was Puerto Rico's that tree was the most colorful and full of pride. Every little globe had a colorful decoration or scene & a Puerto Rican Flag.
This one was also important because University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez is one of the partner schools in CenSSIS, and one of the faculty from UPRM was with us when we went o see the trees. Also, in January CenSSIS will have its leadership retreat near UPRM and as the Student Leadership Council we'll get to go on that trip as well.
Many of the other states weren't obvious as to why they were decorated as they were but some were really pretty nonetheless. I also really liked Massachusetts' (not just because that's where NU is), though I'm still not sure why it was doves sitting on red berries.
Friday, the meetings weren't applicable to us as students, so we went into the city to see the museums. I didn't know that all of the Smithsonian Museums are free, that's really nice. I guess I got too used to New England where it's pretty expensive to go to museums (though with NU ID we get in free to the Museum of Fine Arts). The three of us spent the whole time in the Air and Space Museum. We had so much fun in there. We started in the Planets exhibit and we were there for almost 45 minutes.
After the museum we walked a couple of blocks and went to lunch in ESPN Zone, which as an avid football fan, I must say is pretty much the best restaurant ever. On the way there we saw this:
we decided this was photo-worthy. None of us were sure exactly why or how. (Yes, we did try to figure out HOW it got on the handle... we're engineers we reverse engineers.
