Merry Christmas in DC

Those who know me well know that I would prefer to stay out of Washington, DC, as much as possible. I’m not a city boy. However, Washington is a beautiful city (as cities go), and when you have time to actually look at the city instead of trying to drive in the traffic, it can actually be enjoyable.

For the past few weeks I have been working on a project that has taken me inside the city limits. My normal office is just outside the city, just over the Potomac River from the Kennedy Center. We can see the major landmarks from our office window. The Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, the Tidal Basin, the Lincoln Memorial, and the White House are all directly in our view from the office windows. We get to see the sun rising over Capitol Hill each morning—so the view is great and I don’t usually have to actually go into town to see the sights.

But for the past two weeks I have come to my office just outside of DC and then caught the metro train into one of our downtown offices on the corner of G and 10th Streets. This means I don’t have to drive in the city traffic and I still get to see the beautiful Christmas decorations all over the place.

Deloitte’s G Street office is in a beautiful office building attached to the Grand Hyatt DC hotel. The office’s lobby is a large square of marble and it extends all the way to the top of the building where it terminates in a huge skylight. The lobby has four large palm trees in huge marble boxes. There are fountains flanking the entrance to my office.

Because of the long nights we have had recently, I have been staying in the Grand Hyatt DC hotel. My office building’s lobby opens to my office and also to the hotel, so I don’t even have to go outside to get to the hotel. In fact, the Metro Center subway station I get off at has an escalator that goes directly into my office lobby—so I don’t have to go outside at all.

Anyway... I was heading out of the hotel yesterday morning to go back to the office. I stepped into the lobby, which is decorated for the season. Christmas presents are filling the boxes that hold the palm trees, ribbons decorate the tops of the boxes, and lights spiral up the palm tree trunks. It’s quite beautiful. So I stopped, put down my backpack, set up my tripod and camera and took these pictures.

Washington, D.C., is a beautiful city with some very beautiful buildings. And sometimes it just requires us to stop for long enough to notice.