<p>You do not need a car at all to get around Georgetown. The whole neighborhood is easily walked. However, there is no Metro stop there. By geography and infrastructure, the Georgetown neighborhood is a little set off from the rest of the DC metro area.</p>
<p>The transportation systems in the East generally have a North-South orientation. Getting east and west from DC (say, to the Atlantic Ocean beaches) is more challenging than going North to Philadelphia and NYC. If you are under 25 in the USA, renting a car can be very expensive (if possible at all) but many college communities now have “zip cars” for student use. </p>
<p>Georgetown (the neighborhood) is a very good college town, if you can call it that (it is oriented as much to tourists and career people as students). I wouldn’t put it quite up there with Cambridge, Boulder, Ann Arbor … or Berkeley … but there is definitely plenty to keep you busy and entertained. You can find everything from a taste of Sodom and Gomorrah in the clubs to a quiet walk along the C&O Canal path, high-end shopping in the Georgetown Park stores, or highbrow culture beyond Georgetown in the museums and Kennedy Center. There’s also a lot of interesting history in nearby Virginia and Maryland, such as antebellum mansions (George Washington’s Mount Vernon etc), Civil War battlefields, or colonial Williamsburg. On a few isolated islands in the Chesapeake Bay or coastal South, local people speak unusual dialects of English (something like Elizabethan English on Tilghman; an African-flavored creole called “Geechee” in coastal South Carolina and Georgia). The Amish communities of Southern Pennsylvania attract many tourists (somewhat to their annoyance apparently).</p>