Having never been in Washington before, and with the heat, we might have been forgiven for thinking it was like California. It's not.  The people who we met in Washington were polite, not unfriendly - but certainly at first - they didn't smile much.  They were even a little abrupt and some of the announcements on the Metro were completely unintelligible.

And it's true what they say about the UK and the US - we are two nations divided by a common language. At Mr Smith's - a bar in Georgetown which is an institution in the city - we tried unsuccessfully to ask for water.  The waiter only realised what we were saying when we asked for "warda".

Our first day was spent on a bus getting an eyeful of the monuments and buildings in this lovely city. It's a bit like the American version of Paris or Rome - classical allusions simply litter the place, with ornate plasterwork decorating every spare corner, pillar or wall.  And because nothing is built higher than the statue of liberty adorning the Capitol Building, Washington is low rise in comparison to many other American cities, and as a result, even with the columns and porticos, seems actually fairly human.

This feeling was reinforced by the tour guide on one of the buses we took; her recitation of facts and figures was fairly perfunctuary - until she got to talk about food. Her knowledge of pizza outlets, McDonalds', and burrito bars seemed encyclopedic. While she mistakenly put Concorde in the Washington building of the Aviation and Space Museum, she could tell us authoritatively that there were 30 flavours of ice cream available in the Food Court.