Boston baby!
I think the last blog left off when we were about to leave the hostel, and rather a lot has happened since then. We travelled across Boston and then out of the city to Beverly, where we met Charlie`s Aunt, Maureen. She took us on a tour of the area, including Gloucester and Rockport, really the whole Cape Ann region, which is the quintessential seaside New England. The houses are all clad with wood, there´s seafood and ice cream everywhere, and the whole place has a very historic feel to it, which I guess is fitting considering that these are some of the earlier settlements in America`s history.
After our tour, which included some pretty bracing weather, we went back to Maureen`s house and met her husband Mark, and two sons Henry and Adrian. It`s a beautiful house, surrounded by a big garden and lots of woodland... We couldn`t see an awful lot of it on Friday night though, we ended up being pretty well battered by storms (incidentally, this region inspired A Perfect Storm. So, yeah.) but the next morning was as bright and blue as anything.
Bright and blue makes perfect weather for sightseeing, and Maureen took us on a tour of Boston itself, including a trip round the Institute of Contemporary Art. There were some... original things going on in there. I, for one, certainly never thought I´d see a whole canvas covered in the mascara markings from someone batting their eyelashes, but there were some really fun exhibits in there. One of the things that Boston likes to emphasise the most, and rightly so, is its part in the American Revolution, so we followed the freedom trail around the bay and into the city itself.
Boston is a bustling, open city, much easier to actually breathe in than New York, but our attention was grabbed by a big crowd of people surrounding what looked like a car crash. Turned out it was a film crew making the new Ryan Reynolds/Kevin Bacon action film, and we have a few sneaky photos to prove it. We took a tour of the Old Statehouse, which is beautiful and proud of its history, and saw the new City House, which is not. At the Old Statehouse we took a tour about the Boston Massacre, which was really even-handed. Turns out the massacre only included 5 people dying. Still not nice, but hardly the decimation of the population told by Paul Revere.
Last night we went to a Boston University ice hockey game, playing against Denver, and I don´t think it had actually dawned on us how big College sports are until we entered the arena. It´s bigger than any of the ice hockey arenas we`ve seen, and the place was pretty full. Instead of having canned muzak (rubbish, generic music used for background noise) to fill in the gaps between plays, they had the University Pep Band playing appropriate sports-montage-y hits, and both ends of the arena were packed with current BU students yelling abuse at the opposing goalie ("Sieve! Sieve!"). BU won 4-3, but it was a really close game.
Gonna go now, as we´re about to hunt some witches in Salem. They make a really good renewable energy source. And tourist attraction.
Ciao ciao,
Chris and Charlie
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