I've heard a lot of interesting things as a tour guide. In this video
I'm going to tell you about seven of the most common things visitors tell me surprise them about Washington DC.
HELLO! Welcome to Trip Hacks DC. My name is Rob. I'm a tour guide here in the nation's capital.
If you're coming to Washington DC
and you're looking for the best tips, tricks, and hacks for exploring the city, make sure to subscribe to this channel and hit the bell
notification icon so that you don't miss anything.
And if you're interested in taking a tour with me, head on over to my website TripHacksDC.com
afterwards to see the tours that I offer. If you've been to Washington DC before and there's something that surprised you about the city leave
a comment on this video and let me know what it was. Otherwise, let's get started.
1. Everything is free! Okay, so maybe not everything is free, but for so many of the things to see and do here
you won't have to pay a single penny. For example:
The National Mall - FREE!
Smithsonian museums - FREE!
The Capitol Visitor Center - FREE!
National Archives - FREE!
U.S Botanic Gardens - FREE!
National Gallery of Art - FREE!
And the National Zoo - FREE!
in most other cities around the world
you'd have to pay to see any of these attractions, if they exist at all. And it's not just that these things are free,
it's that the quality is really quite incredible. For example the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum is hardly
the only of its kind, but ours is just so much better than a lot of the competition.
2. Everything is so expensive!
This is sort of the flipside of what I just described. Even though so much to see and do here is free,
what you do have to pay for can give you serious sticker shock. Washington DC,
simply put, is a city with a high cost of living. For
tourists, this is most evident at restaurants and bars. Sit-down restaurants as you might expect are pretty expensive.
But even the fast casual type places that we have nowadays can be pretty pricey too.
And this is one of the big differences between Washington DC and another big city like New York. Even though
New York City is a notoriously expensive place as well,
you can still find dollar slices of pizza and cheap street food all over the place.
We really don't have that here. Ar bars drinks can seem almost comically overpriced,
depending on where you're coming from. For example some places might sell you a can of PBR
for $5 and call it a special with a straight face.
Honestly the best way to avoid a serious sticker shock is just to
expect that everything is going to be really expensive when you come here,
and then be pleasantly surprised if it isn't.
3. Your favorite Hollywood TV show or movie about DC is not realistic.
Unfortunately all of those shows and movies that are set in DC
do a pretty terrible job of describing what life is really like here. One exception to this might be the West Wing, which people who
work in politics - not me - have said is fairly realistic. Other shows like the Blacklist or Bones are just pure Hollywood fiction.
But perhaps the thing that surprises people the most is that shows that are set in DC are almost never
filmed here. For example House of Cards is filmed in Baltimore.
Scandal - filmed in Los Angeles. Homeland is filmed in Charlotte and more recently, Richmond, Virginia.
It personally drives me pretty crazy when I see the Los Angeles or the Baltimore Metro is standing in for ours because they look almost
nothing alike.
4. Yes there is an entire city here beyond the National Mall.
The District of Columbia has a
population a little over 680,000 people, and the metro area
a little more than six million people - that's more than the entire country of Denmark.
I once had someone come on my tour and make a fairly weird comment.
She said "I've been here for an entire week
but I haven't seen a single house. Does anyone actually live in this city?" The answer of course is yes,
but we don't live on the National Mall. So while I strongly suggest picking a hotel and staying downtown
so they are close to a lot of the attractions,
I also think it's worth to venture out into some of the neighborhoods and experience a little bit of the culture here as well. You are
simply going to miss out on a lot if you only stick to the National Mall.
5. It's clean here
(relatively speaking). This one always catches me a little off-guard
personally because I don't always think of the city as being particularly clean. What I found is that usually
people who say that this surprises them say it because they have just come from visiting New York City. Now look -
I love New York City, think it's a great place to visit, but you got to admit
it's not the cleanest place on earth. Between garbage on the streets, the fearless rats
and that smell - you know what I'm talking about if you've ever been there - Washington DC
is just a much less densely populated city, and so there's just not as much garbage here.
6. We don't have any skyscrapers. The tallest building in Washington DC is the Washington Monument of course it stands at
555 feet tall. The tallest residential and office buildings are only about
200 feet tall. The One First National Center in Omaha,
Nebraska is almost 80 feet taller than the Washington Monument!
In fact just about every major city in the United States has at least one building
that's taller than our Washington Monument.
And by the way that claim that we don't have any skyscrapers because no building is supposed to be taller than the monument...
total myth.
7. Yes, there are a lot of joggers. Washington
DC is a pretty health-conscious city and a lot of people workout either outside or
inside at gyms. The National Mall is a magnet for joggers because honestly it's a great place to run.
It's a big beautiful park with limited intersections and crossings, and it's really safe.
I'm more of a bicyclists than a jogger myself, but if I did run
I definitely would do it on the National Mall. And that's it!
Thank you for watching this video. If you found it helpful you can subscribe to this channel by clicking on the
Trip Hacks DC
logo, which is popping up right now at the bottom of the screen. And if you're coming to DC
and you want to sign up for a private tour with me, you can click on the Capitol dome on the left side of my
head, that'll take you over to my website TripHacksDC.com where you can see the tours that I offer. Enjoy your trip!