Personal Narrative: My Trip To Washington D. C.

My family loves to host exchange students. In 2008, our first one stayed with us, a Swiss teenager named Andrea who had hopes of learning English before going to college. We decided it would be in her best interest to visit Washington D.C. and view all the towering monuments and government buildings, because what exchange student wouldn’t want a tour of our nation’s capital. At that time, Andrea was 19 and had been staying at our house for three months. She was new to life in America and was still naïve to the idea of streets full of people and dangerous situations. She was a nice person but also had a quiet disposition. We took the Metro to the middle of the city and ventured to the Capital Building, the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, and various other places in the city. Through our stay we could tell that Andrea wasn’t used to this type of environment, and that it was difficult for her to adapt. She was always lagging behind, constantly forcing us to cut back and find her.

After a long day of walking through the bustling city, we decided to take the subway back to our van in the outskirts of D.C. Down we went into the stomach of the city, grabbing tickets and sprinting towards the platform to make it to the next train, since there was a 10-minute wait in between each trolley. Andrea offered

All you could hear was the deafening noise of feet stomping, walking, and running, mixed with the occasional street performer playing music. You could hear anything from Mozart’s symphonies on a violin to hard rock on a makeshift drum set of trash cans and paint buckets. The walls and floor were made of concrete, drab and uniform, making the journey to the platform feel lifeless and dull. There was trash everywhere, plastic bags, papers, even Styrofoam cups, and nobody was making any effort to pick it up. This was nothing like it was in Switzerland, Andrea had told us, much less was it like anything in