Wild Goose Chase

Let me reach into my memory and pull out an experience from my trip to Washington DC:

Capitol Hill day. I hadn't been super excited about it until my brief visit to the Capitol the previous day. Walking through the office buildings, seeing Ron Paul's office, asking Nancy Pelosi's secretary for gallery passes to the senate--It was simply amazing. So here I was, on the real Capitol Hill day, all of us dressed up in formal clothes, with a couple hours of free time. We decided we wanted to visit a committee meeting, and glancing through our scedule of committee meetings we decided that the Senate budget meeting would be interesting. So off we went to Dirksen Senate Office room 324.

Upon arriving at room 324, Caitlyn tried turning the handle, but the door wouldn't open. Maddie pulled and jiggled the handle, and the door opened.* It was a janitor's closet. Well, so much for that. We looked on a board in the hallway that told where meetings were taking place and chose another interesting one: Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, room 328 A, Russel building. Of course, going to another building meant going through security again, but it was worth it.

So, we arrive at room 328 A. We walk in, and ask the person working in the office if we can enter the meeting, only to be informed that the one we are looking for isn't here, and the one that is here is private. I forget what happened next, but I believe we somehow managed to go to the Hart Senate building. There, we found out that the Dirksen building had a lot of meetings going on there, why don't we try that? They told us we could go through the underground tunnels, so we did.

We were told there were meetings in room 106 and 523. I tried to remember the numbers but somehow all of us managed to forget the second one. So we tried going to 106, finding that it was empty. We looked on a board on the wall, and it listed the Senate Budget meeting in room 624.

"Let's try to go to that," someone suggested, as we realized that it must be the one that our paper had told us was in room 324. When we got there, we asked about it.

"Sorry," the woman there said. "That meeting was postponed to next Tyuesday." Fortunately, she recomended we try room 215--a finance meeting was occuring there with Timothy Geitner. We decided to try that one, after all, it sounded very interesting.

With only 20 or 30 minutes until we needed to meet up with the rest of our group, we wondered if this time would be the one. "Each place we try has been more and more legitmate," I commented. "Maybe this one will actually work." On the elevator, we asked the other people on it if they knew whether there was a finance committee meeting in room 215. They didn't know. They must've been wondering why four high school students would want to know.

Room 215, ahead. A blonde-hairded woman was standing by the door. She affirmed that this was the meeting we were looking for, and said that we could go in--but there were only three open seats. We were making plans to switch off who was watching when she peeked in, and informed us that there were actually four. So we entered, sitting in the front row of seats at a committee meeting that other people might actually watch on TV, literally ten feet away from Tim Geitner. Unfortunately, I was unable to understand what they were all saying, but the experience was amazing nonetheless. Afterwords, the others told me what they were talking about. ;)

-Rebecca

*This was the second time that week that she had opened a seemingly locked door. She assumes that they must have not been locked but I maintain that she is a wizard and this is her first sign of magical ablities.

P.S. By the way, I will affirm that Sachi was not lying http://dial-a-for-awkward.blogspot.com/2009/01/just-because-metro-contains-letter-t.html when she said that the DC Metro makes you pay to get off it!

P.P.S. There might be more Close-Up stories coming, but it's not super likely since this was by far the best story I have.