Washington DC — part deux

Today we hit the National Gallery of Art and to satisfy my numismatic cravings — The Bureau of Printing and Engraving. We saw some interesting things at both places.

Here is a sampling of the Art:

Beauty & the Beast

The artist is Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593). His paintings were portraits of people made of painted fruit, vegetables and other assorted items. He has a couple of paintings that looked normal upside (right side?) down, but when they were turned around it showed a portrait of a person i.e. The cook showed a platter of meat but upside down it looked like a chef. Check out his stuff here.

The goose bumps rose at our next stop:

They wouldn't let us take photos at the locations that they were actually printing the money. The picture above is the new $100 bill that will be out sometime next year. We got to walk through a glassed walkway above the printing presses. They had a stack of $20 uncut bills about four feet high with 32 uncut bills to the sheet. The stack of money totaled $6,400,000.

There were two signs in the printing room that caught my eye: Free samples given out tomorrow (just my luck) and You think that you're depressed. I just printed my life time earnings in 30 seconds.

Great day and a great trip.