Urbzen

Welcome to the nation’s capital! We’re glad you’re here. To ensure this weekend is a great time for everyone, we’ve put together some friendly pointers to help you navigate the city.

• Stand right, walk left. I cannot overstate this point. The entire city is going to be on edge this week, and blocking everyone’s progress is enough to get you shoved down the escalator.
• Once you’re in the station, have your Metro card ready to avoid rummaging through your Spy Museum gift bag while everyone waiting behind you thinks about throwing you on the tracks. You knew you were going into a Metro station, right? This isn’t a surprise.
• Should you make it all the way down the escalator and onto the train, your work still isn’t done. Please do not plant yourself directly in front of the door and then wonder, aloud, why everybody is pushing you. Grab your fannypack and get the hell out of the way.
• Similarly, don’t walk three wide down the sidewalk at a pace slower than Robert Byrd on a bad day. Move it or lose it. Seriously.
• When you’re eating out, if you don’t know what it is, you probably shouldn’t order it. You can try a kay-suh-dill-uh some other time.
• Be advised that while your waiter probably will ask you where you are from, this is not your cue to recite the entire 300-year history of Texarkana. He’s only asking to be polite, and because he probably can’t think of one single other thing to chat you up about.
• Despite the fact that you’re on vacation, this isn’t Disney Land. DC is an actual city where actual people work at their actual jobs. You might get lucky and find somebody who wants to stop and explain the difference between the 14 Smithsonian museums, but don’t count on it.
• Nobody wants to know that this isn’t the way they do things in Toledo. God willing you’ll be back there soon enough, so shut the hell up already.