Friday evening: the monuments, on foot, after dark
Every guide tells you to see the National Mall. None of them tell you to do it at ten at night, which is the only time it is actually yours. The Lincoln Memorial is open twenty-four hours and staffed but empty; the Korean War Veterans Memorial across the path is genuinely unnerving in low light and worth the detour. Start at the Washington Monument and walk west. It is about a mile and a half end to end and costs nothing.
Take the Metro to Foggy Bottom rather than Smithsonian. It is the same walk, and you avoid the stretch where every food option is a cart charging nine dollars for a hot dog.
Saturday morning: Eastern Market, then the part of Capitol Hill nobody photographs
Eastern Market on Saturday is the closest thing DC has to a neighborhood square. Go for the blueberry buckwheat pancakes at the Market Lunch counter, accept that the line is thirty minutes, and eat standing up. The outdoor flea market next to it is browsing, not buying: on an intern’s budget you are there for the atmosphere and the two-dollar peaches.
Then walk north into the residential blocks around Lincoln Park. This is the version of Capitol Hill that has nothing to do with the Capitol: row houses, dog walkers, and a scale that makes the federal city feel briefly like somewhere people live.
Saturday afternoon: pick one museum and actually finish it
The Smithsonians are free, which creates a trap. You try to do four and remember none. Pick one. The National Portrait Gallery is the strongest argument for this approach: it is small enough to complete, its courtyard is the best free indoor space in the city, and the presidents hall is the rare famous thing that lives up to the queue.
If it is over ninety degrees, and between June and September it will be, the Kogod Courtyard is air-conditioned, has free wifi, and nobody will ask why you have been sitting there for two hours.
Saturday night: Adams Morgan, or the cheaper truth
Adams Morgan is where interns are told to go and it is fine, in the way that any street of bars is fine. The better version is Columbia Heights one stop north: the same night out for two-thirds the price, and the Saturday crowd is people who live there rather than people visiting for a summer.
Sunday: the Potomac, and the one thing worth paying for
Rent a kayak at the Key Bridge Boathouse. It runs about twenty dollars an hour, it is the single purchase in this itinerary I would defend, and paddling under Key Bridge with Georgetown on one side and Rosslyn on the other reframes a city you have only seen from the inside of a Metro car. Go early; the river gets crowded and hot by noon.
Finish at the Georgetown waterfront with a coffee and the crew boats going past. You will have spent less than sixty dollars and seen more of the city than most people who work here.