just saw anthony bourdain’s treatment on the District, and it’s pretty spot on for someone who hasn’t spent much time here — especially his closing bit on how badly the city is misunderstood by outsiders:

D.C. is not just a city of dead presidents and cold marble monuments.

The people we see working here on our television screens, in the halls of power, in the plush seats of Sunday morning punditry, often have as little to do with the city itself, and the people who actually live here, as any creature from another universe.

This is a city filled with actual living, breathing, eating Americans. Not vessels for one ideology or another, or empty suits with empty ideas. They have hard lives, hard struggles and have taken long roads to get here.

Maybe at the end of the day a delicious bite, a laugh, a warm welcome from somebody you didn’t know before, is as much as we can reasonably hope for.

Maybe our kids will get it right.

Maybe.