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Spies, Crimes and Headlinesby Dina GanIt's an election year, which has often made me think of visiting our nation's capital, Washington, DC. I once lived there for a year and a half, and I became well-acquainted with the Smithsonian, the monuments, the cherry blossoms, and all the other perennial tourist attractions. So on a recent day trip, I focused on new museums that have opened in recent years, all within walking distance of the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station. Once a dicey area of the District, Chinatown has developed into a heavily commercialized stretch complete with a Starbucks and Urban Outfitters. The still-standing Chinese gate over H Street -- and the fact that store signs are printed in English and Chinese characters -- is the only evidence that this neighborhood has any ethnic roots. Like the neighborhood, the following three museums offer a sense of the new. All are highly interactive and jam-packed with enough edutainment to make you learn something without even trying. Newseum 
"News is what somebody, somewhere, wants to suppress," once said a famous British newspaper publisher. Here in this gleaming building of glass and steel, you'll find 14 main exhibition galleries covering five centuries of news history from around the world. Humanity's triumphs and terrors are on display in the form of artifacts, such as a section of the Berlin Wall and a piece of the antenna mast from the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The accompanying newspaper front-pages of the day illustrate the importance of the media in documenting the world's most pivotal events.
Throughout the museum, you'll have numerous opportunities to sit at a computer kiosk for an interactive learning experience or duck into a small film screening room to view a documentary. My favorite activity was the NBC News interactive newsroom, where you can choose from a selection of video backdrops, like a weather map or the White House, and read a script from a TelePrompter in
a simulated news studio. For $5, you can have your segment uploaded to the Internet for viewing by your family and friends.
International Spy Museum This museum is a love-hate letter to espionage. Both glorifying and vilifying the most clever and covert intelligence agents in history, the exhibits here are immersive and sometimes chilling. 
A visit begins by being herded through a maze of entry ropes, up an elevator and into a small screening room, where you're shown an orientation film about the reality of spies in the modern world -- yes, they exist, and they are in high concentration in Washington, DC. After the film, you're sent to a holding room for debriefing, where a guard instructs you to choose a cover identity from those displayed on the walls. (The only Asian cover identity I saw was a male Chinese dentist, so I opted to just be myself.) Then you're set free to explore.
I visited on a Saturday, and the museum was so crowded that "exploring" felt more like "waiting in line." But if you're patient (or visit on a weekday), there's an impressive amount of cool things to see, such as wristwatch
cameras, code machines, a lipstick pistol, and shoes with bugging devices in the heels. For an extra fee, you can sign up for "Operation Spy," an hour-long interactive experience in which you play the role of a U.S. intelligence agent on an international mission to locate a missing nuclear device.
National Museum of Crime & Punishment 
The newest of the three, this museum opened in May of 2008 and is the broadcast studio of the TV show America's Most Wanted. You can wander through the set of the crime-fighting reality show and learn about the criminals caught with the help of the show.  Then check out the museum's other exhibits, where you can test your shooting skills, try your hand at safe-cracking and computer-hacking, stand in a police lineup, see if you can outsmart a lie detector test, try to escape a jail cell, and learn the secret meanings of inmates' tattoos.  On the law-enforcement side of things, you can try out a high-speed police chase simulator and test your accuracy in a simulated FBI shooting range. You can also learn about forensic science in the CSI Lab, where exhibits explain how ballistics, toxicology, and DNA analysis are used to solve crime. There's even a simulated murder victim to examine on an autopsy table. The displays range from the tame (a set of
dishes used by the Cosa Nostra) to the stomach-turning (mug shots of serial killers), so beware if you're squeamish about violence.
Food Notes: Skip the Chinatown Express on Sixth Street. Sure, the guy making noodles in the window is fun to watch, and the handmade noodles are decent, but the price is too high: $5.95 for a bowl plus the emotional distress of sitting next to ignorant tourists whispering "What is that?" while trying to read the menu. For more authentic Chinese food, make a short detour to Rockville and eat at A&J (1319C Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD, 301-251-7878). The long menu of small dishes includes Northern Chinese home-style treats such as braised pork on rice, beef tendon, spicy pickled cucumber, and thousand-year-old egg on a fluffy cloud of soft tofu. |
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