The contrast is amazing. Embassies can be on one street, the slums just a block or two over. It’s really quite an amazing city. Breathtakingly beautiful, yet go a little further and you get real heartbreaking ugliness and crime. Totally mixed up city, in more ways than one. But the parts that are pretty are VERY pretty.
It’s a beautiful city on a beautiful stretch of a beautiful river. Too bad it is now filled with the most corrupt people on earth. The corruptocrats of the Grant Administration would blanch at their antics.
As far as the Smithsonian is concerned, it has amazing artifacts but you cannot read any of the explanations that go with them. They are horribly pc and anti-American. Shocking, really.