Try our California-style pizza.
Adding to the list of must try foods:
BonChon Chicken. Korean fried chicken, and probably some of the best, if not the best, you will ever have. Made to order, so be prepared to wait 1/2 hour.
I agree, the worst things about the DC area are the insane traffic, horrible summers, and the cost of housing. In the VA suburbs, what’s great is that we have so many people from all over the world, and the restaurants and food shopping choices that come with that diversity. There are a lot of interesting, smart people here, if you dig through the grim striving types who are drawn here. It’s a very transient area, though, and a lot of people complain about how hard it is to make and keep friends around.
Looking forward to when you have your first experience with everything shutting down due to one inch of snow. We survive these crises by purchasing large quantities of bread.
Yes, this is a donut wasteland. No one seems to know or care what a good cake donut should be like. (We once went as far as Haymarket to get a fairly good donut at a place I think was called Cafe Bonjour.)
I don’t know. I find the last two weeks in August make for a relatively pleasant commute.
I’m a DMV transplant from the Midwest - we’ve been here for 16 years now. One thing that I like a lot about living in the DC area is that there are a lot of highly educated people. Being smart is cool! It’s OK to be knowledgeable about obscure topics! Example: last weekend at the neighborhood pool, my husband had a long conversation with a neighbor about the factors that influenced the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Also, if you’re living in MoCo, don’t tell people you live in DC. If you’re out of town, you can say you live in the DC area, or in Maryland near DC, but not DC itself. And apparently the DMV isn’t in particularly widespread usage, but I like it.
People have mentioned the traffic, and it’s true. But nobody’s mentioned one of the reasons why traffic is so bad:
As a fellow transplanted Californian, I grew up in a grid street system. If you turned west on Main street, you had a high confidence that you’d end up west of your original location. Also, I knew that if I was ever lost, I could just drive due east or west and hit a highway (I5 or Hwy 99) which would orient me and I could get home.
None of that is true over here. There are very few straight streets here. They were all “planned” by someone spilling asphalt on old ox/wagon trails. So if one street is jammed with traffic, there are almost no alternative routes that aren’t 50 miles out of your way. And odds are that if you turn west on Main street, you’ll end up east of your original location because of the insane way all the streets twist and turn!
tl;dr: even if you have great natural spacial ability like me, GPS is your best buddy
Well the Corcoran has closed (it’s not clear whether GWU and the National Gallery are keeping the old facility open, or absorbing it into their own collections), and the others you mention aren’t free…
but I’d bet you don’t have Darth Vader on any of your cathedrals out on the west coast!
That is awesome. 
You’re in NoVa, aren’t you? 
DC proper has a grid system. What messes people up are the Circles, the Quadrants, and the “State” Avenues that run diagonally across the grid in various directions.
In Maryland many of these “State” Avenues continue as major streets and go on for quite a ways. Wisconsin Ave goes straight north through Bethesda, Rockville, and all the way up to Frederick, some 40 miles north of the DC line. Georgia Ave runs through Silver Spring, up the Eastern side of MoCo, and you could follow it all the way to Gettysburg. Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania Aves also run quite deep into suburban Maryland, so if you ever get lost, you can pretty much drive in any direction and run across one of these eventually, and they will bring you back to DC.
The crazy thing about Arlington is that it is about as far from a grid as you can get, but it’s named as if it were a grid—numbered street run east-west (although no street actually runs east-west). And cross-streets are named in alphabetical order.
The result is that a single street names appears non-continuously all across the county.
In DC the majority of north-south streets are numbered descending to North Capitol and South Capitol bisecting the city. The east-west streets start as letters, then two syllable words then three syllable words in alphabetical order from city center. Therefore you can guess pretty accurately where “16th & Kennedy NW” will be in the city grid (16 blocks west of centerline, about 65 blocks north).
Won’t get into the pissing matches about the good & bad, it is a city like and unlike all the others. Both the phrases ‘city without a soul’ & ‘Hollywood for ugly people’ ring true. That said there is plenty of authentic international ethnicity to explore (including good Mexican if you dare to go find it!) and a region of great variety. City, country, mountains, wilderness, ocean - all within a short (ish) drive, and great other cities not too far away if you want to go visiting.
Yeah I’m thinking a DC Dopefest might be brewing…
DC is in between two zones. As you drive east you start to see more pines and the solid,gets more sandy. It’s striking to me the difference I see driving from Silver Spring to College Park.
A place to get good salsa is Lime Fresh Mexican Grill. The rest of the food there is O.K. but nothing special. They have a range of great salsas in their salsa bar though. I create my own blend of salsas that I bring to meetings, parties, and my office by combining their salsas with various things from own collection of hot sauces and other items. I go into Lime Fresh and get eight orders of chips and salsa to go. I despise the crap sold as bottled salsa in supermarkets. There are Lime Fresh restaurants on 7th Street in D.C. and at Pentagon Row in Northern Virginia.
The D.C. area has actual weather. It gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Expect to experience both hot humid days and blizzards. If you don’t like weather, find somewhere else to live.
The roads in Northern Virginia are confusing. The ones in D.C. are the most logically laid out ones anywhere, I suspect. Most of the streets are arranged as a Cartesian coordinate system with the Capitol Building as the point where the x- and y-axes cross.
I go to a lot of book readings and signings. A lot of these are at or are run by Politics and Prose Bookstore on Connecticut Avenue in D.C. Politics and Prose probably has more book signings per year than anywhere else in the world. They have several standard larger venues for really crowded readings. The readings before the signings are frequently shown on the cable channel C-SPAN 2. They are so famous that there was a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying one of them. Occasionally more or less famous people (with no connection to the book) will shown up at Politics and Prose to listen to the reading and get a book signed.
This is because the county was originally comprised of small settlements connected by trolley lines and old cart paths like Glebe Road, the names of these settlements are still used for the names of neighborhoods. Each of these small settlements had their own grid pattern; as settlements grew their grid pattern started interlocking with other settlements’ grid patterns. Each settlement also used their own street naming system, resulting in one very confusing crazy quilt of grid patterns, so the Postal Service stepped in and established the naming system we see today.
Those trolley lines? They were eventually torn up and replaced with Drives, such as Walter Reed and Fairfax, and I-66.
Some of the original settlements, such as Arlington Forest, Barcroft, Glencarlyn, and Virginia Highlands, can still be seen on this 1945 topography map.
Also, turns out that much of 66 in Arlington is on a former railway right-of-way.
Well, they did it in a stupid way. Street segments that don’t connect with each other should not bear the same name. And you shouldn’t have, for example, both a “4th St. N.” and also a “4th Road N.”
I was just thinking about that the other day. Mexican food is just EVERYWHERE. In some towns near where I live, there is a tacqueris on almost every corner of all the main roads. And chances are if you go into one, everyone will be speaking Spanish. Got a bunch of people coming over for the game? Mexican food. Birthday party? Mexican food. Kids graduation? Mexican food!!!
Every farmers’ market will have several stalls with Mexican food being served. The one I frequent has this tiny lady selling tomales in one booth and another lady selling Oaxacan food. There are 5 Mexican restaurants that I can walk to from my house in < 5 minutes.
While we were out there, we did notice an abundance of intersections between streets like Flower Place, Flower Road and Flower Terrace. We were relying heavily on GPS anyway, but it still managed to be very confusing.
That’s the Federal Government for ya. 
Oh. Tacoma Park.
Nice area!
As I NoVA resident I fully endorse this message. I find the roads in the MD suburbs confusing also, mostly due to lack of familiarity on my part.
I must disagree with you in this case. DC roads are confusing as can be. The overlay of the Cartesian system with the diagonal streets is a mess. I was walking through an intersection of a numbered street, a lettered street, and a state-named avenue. I had some extra time so I went all around the intersection stopping at each corner to figure out which roads I was next to at that moment. Even taking my time and reading the street signs it was a very challenging task. That was on foot. Now try driving through such an intersection in traffic and with the tiny unlit street signs going by. Turn right onto Mass Ave - OK, which right turn: 90 degrees? 45 degrees? 132.5 degrees? Too late - I’m at the next corner. At which the road becomes one way only, in the direction opposite my travel. :mad:
Yes, DC area traffic is awful because the roads are always above capacity. But a road system based on a design to confuse raiding pirates, rather than promote the flow of yet-to-be-invented cars, is a significant contributor.
There is much I enjoy about the DC area. Roads and traffic are not two of them. With the possible exceptions of the new-ish changes on the southern Beltway. The Springfield Interchange, the new Wilson Bridge and related improvements, the HOT lanes all made traffic better. Every day I drive through these I am still pleasantly shocked at the improvement. We’d had a very different track record before.