Amy and I spent most of Memorial Day relaxing at home, though we did go out for a few hours to grab a sushi lunch at Mary Surratt’s boarding house (AKA Wok and Roll), browse the Reynolds Center, and walk around the Haupt Garden.

The Fortune

I don’t normally have a high degree of trust for Asian “fusion” type restaurants like Wok and Roll, whose identity and menu hover between Chinese and Japanese without fully committing to either, but the quality of their food of either genre is unquestionably good, and their salmon sushi has an amazingly perfect oily, melty, squishy feel which sends shudders of pleasure through my frame, so I make exception for this particular establishment. The Chinese end of their repertoire also means that the sushi dinner is followed by fortune cookies, something the itamae at a pure Japanese bar would probably skip on providing with the check. Amy’s particular fortune this day was accompanied by a joyful/ominous Chinese word lesson on the flip side of the strip:

For the record, this fortune remains currently unfulfilled.

Best of SAAM Comments

Stuffed with sushi and fortune cookies, we headed for the Reynolds Center to look at Hip Hop Portraits, plus other more mainstream classical works in the SAAM. One particularly entertaining highlight of the trip was an open “Visitors’ Comments” notebook in one gallery, many of whose pages provided some small amusement:

Castle Garden

From there we traipsed down 6th Street past the Navy Memorial and National Archives, through the Museum of Natural History’s outdoor Butterfly Habitat Garden, across the Mall, around the Castle, and into the Haupt Garden, where I tested my macro skills on flowers and fountains:

Bird and Squirrel

We close now with two rather blurry animal videos: a bird (possibly a lark) making noises in a tree, and a nervous squirrel with a nut in its mouth.

Quite a relaxing day, with surprisingly minimal people-traffic around spots normally congested with tourists. See more in the DC Weekends May 2008 photoset.