doesn't do the place justice. I'm afraid we didn't either. If we had spent a week or two wandering about we might have seen most of what there was to see and taken it in but the few hours we spent there only served to let us know what we were missing. We began in what is their most modern building, mainly because we could eat there as well. Before we ate we looked at a couple of things, the most spectacular was the giant pendulum which is suspended from the top of the building and swings in it's slow and steady arc down through the holes in several floors to the entrance where it does its job of impressing the people entering very well. In a circle around it are set up little sticks and as the earth slowly rotates the arc of the pendulum stays in the same place but gives the impression that it is slowly moving. Every so often it will knock down another stick, there were a few more knocked down when we left than there were when we entered but we weren't in the right place at the right time to see any of it happening. After our cheap and enjoyable lunch we set out exploring the building properly. The various floors specialize in their exhibits, down in the basement the most striking thing was the biggest steam locomotive I'd ever seen and to get it there they had driven it in and then built the building around it. To entertain the visitors they played tape recordings of what the train had sounded like when it was still in operation and the noise it made was just as big as it was physically. On another floor they had set up a media display with many tv sets replaying video tapes of old news items of world shattering importance- the one I remember most vividly was a news announcer reading the news that President Kennedy had placed a blockade around Cuba. Of course I knew what happened next but that did not remove the feeling of the early 1960's reality which came over me for the time I looked at it. To go earlier back in time we spent a few minutes in a small recreated cinema where we saw newsreels from the 30's. This was a little bit before my time but nonetheless interesting. On yet another floor there were recreations of early houses from various periods of American history. Most of them were furnished to fit and we could peer through the windows or other openings that would not have appeared in the original buildings at what was inside. There were many other things that we saw in even our short visit, a massive stamp collection, models of ships and beast, musical instruments and goodness knows what else. We spent a bit of time and money in the gift shop which had too many tempting things to offer us and then Alexis escorted us over to one of the other buildings to see more. The Smithsonian is well spread out in a few buildings so we enjoyed our walk from one to the other along the tree lined streets. We only spent a few minutes at the next building which was apparently a collection of natural history. We saw only two exhibits but they were enough to keep us occupied. Suspended from the wall of a very large room is a full scale model of a blue whale. It is incredible, that nature can create such huge animals is beyond belief. We stood beneath the model and looked at it from all angles but the sheer size of the monster was something that defied the imagination. The tail alone would have weighed tons and the models of other whales and large fish also displayed alongside the blue whale were dwarfed by it. A gigantic sperm whale seemed to be a grey goldfish by comparison. Alexis led us across the lobby into a room where they had recreated various sorts of dinosaurs. With nothing to compare it to the Brontosaurus would have seemed incredibly large but with the vision of the blue whale still so vividly in our minds it didn't seem very big and when we compared the bulk of the two animals the dinosaur was strictly a midget. Having been boggled by the wonders of nature Alexis then took us to another building where we were treated to the wonders of modern aerospace technology. As we entered the first thing we saw was the gold foil on the Luna Lander and I think that if there had been nothing else to see that would have been enough to keep us occupied for a long time. But as well there were Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, the most interesting was the Gemini for while the Apollo was far more complex and the Mercury far more interesting from an historical point of view the idea of two men living for two weeks or more in the confined space of a Gemini is