We spent a day in Washington D.C. for a Wheein concert!

Having grown up in Baltimore, only an hour outside of Washington D.C. without traffic, it’s always so convenient. In a perfect world, if I had enough money, I would have a cute DC townhouse on Capital Hill, but I don’t think that’s for me in this lifetime.

Regardless, every time my friend and I want to go to a concert, the artists we want to see usually stop in the District of Columbia. We like a lot of Korean singers and groups, and because of the large Korean population in NoVA, they tend to come this way if they’re doing a broader US tour.

I usually tag along with my friend, who picks the concerts. So far she hasn’t failed me in her taste, but I don’t want to jinx my luck going forward!

This time we bought tickets to see Mamamoo’s Wheein, as my friend saw Mamamoo when they came down to Baltimore and swore they were so good live. The tickets weren’t too expensive, so I shrugged and say I would go with her. It would also be our last adventure for a while, as I prepared to go to Korea for two months right after this.

We made a cute little girls’ dinner and afternoon out of this endeavor! Here’s what we did leading up to the concert.

We got an excellent dinner at Rumi’s Kitchen, then walked around.

Our plan originally was to drive down and get a nice dinner, then burn whatever time we had left in the surrounding area. Because the concert was on a Sunday, traffic wasn’t too bad getting into Washington, and then we got lucky and found a free parking spot right next to the concert venue (Warner Theater).

From there, I had booked us reservations to Rumi’s Kitchen. My family, who are snobs about Iranian food and have basically tried it all over the country at this point (we’re Iranian), swears on Rumi’s Kitchen. It’s a little pricy, but that meat melts in your mouth.

I typically don’t recommend anything else but the kabobs to be honest. With my friend, we were seat immediately in the corner, and we ordered the chicken joojeh kabob, a side of charred vegetables, and the soltani, which is a mix of barg and koobideh kabob. We also ordered lubia polo rice and some drinks.

All of this came out to be about $130, which I paid for as a thank you to my friend for driving for all of these years. The standouts to me were the barg and koobideh kabobs. I think their chicken kabobs are really good too, but they do the beef versions too good. They taste like heaven.

I was a bit disappointed in the lubia polo though. It was very dry, and I thought it would taste like my father’s way of preparing it. Instead it was just kind of bitter and bland. I like Rumi’s gheimeh preparation, but the last time I was here I split a ghormeh sabzi with my mother and was very disappointed. It wasn’t good. So that’s why I’d say stick to the regular kabobs.

We had parked about twenty minutes from the restaurant towards the theater, so we walked around and avoided the National Mall, as that was a little further down. We admired the Archives’ architecture, then we went to our usual spot whenever we go to concerts here.

A little close to the National Mall, near the accessible station right around here, there are a bunch of swing sets with tables attached to them. I usually take my friends here because it’s a cute place to sit and chat, and we enjoyed the warm weather before the DMV gets unbearably hot.

We then saw Mamamoo’s Wheein at her first solo concert.

Once it hit 6 PM, we decided to start walking back towards Warner Theater so we could look at the merch, grab drinks, and get comfortable in our seats. We had booked the balcony seats towards the middle, and they were honestly the perfect view. Not too far, not too close. We liked the angles a lot from our seats.

The merchandise wasn’t that cute to us, so we skipped this time. We tend to usually skip, except one time I bought the TXT shirt because I liked the color scheme. My friend bought a cocktail, then we ventured to our seats and waited for the concert to begin.

The whole show was about an hour and a half, with some videos allowing Wheein some time to rest and change her clothes. She’s such a powerhouse when it comes to vocals—she’s willing to bust out those high notes live. I think she wasn’t fully singing live when it came to some of the dance numbers, but for the ballads she had the handheld microphone and was going hard.

It was a good concert overall! I didn’t know any of the songs, and while I don’t think I would listen to them in my free time, I enjoyed her artistry and felt like she was such a good singer. If you’re a fan and have the finances, definitely worth seeing her again.

My friend and I usually flee the concert when the encore starts. Our strategy is we look at the encore, see if there are any songs we really want to see, and then get the heck out of there as soon as we want to flee. We always beat the traffic this way—it was especially handy when we saw TXT in concert the year prior.

She dropped me off at home after a Checkers burger stop, and I was back by 11 PM! Which was a good thing, as I really needed to pack for my Korea trip in the next week. But overall I had such a good time!

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