Monday, June 2, 2014

Our Visit to Boston

Last Monday was Memorial Day, as every time we have a holiday, we decided to visit another corner of the country. This time we flew to Boston. It is one of the oldest cities in the US, and walking around the street you can sense part of the US history. Also, Boston is home to many universities, making the city more innovative and culturally diverse.


We arrived on Friday evening. 40% of Boston's area is water. This lowers down the temperature, which made us, for once, miss the weather back in Michigan (yes, spring finally arrived, the temperature is the best in the year, almost every day around 20-25 degC).



On Saturday we started very early, excited to check out the city. Out hotel was in Cambridge, at the other side of the river, so we had to cross the bridge to get to the main city. On our way there, we realized Bostonians are obsessed with running. Continuously you can find somebody running on the street you are passing, especially near the river. It is way above normal, and it makes you want to run too!


The west side of Boston is very lively, it seemed to be residential, with very nice restaurants, terraces etc. We arrived to the Public Library, which is very famous for bring one of the oldest in the US. It is a beautiful building both from the outside and the inside.


Further on we started the Freedom Trail, a path through the city that leads to to 16 historic sites. This one on the picture is the Old South Meeting House, known as the place where the Boston Tea Party was initiated.


Before moving on with the trail we went south to the Financial District. It was Saturday, which implies low to no activity in that part of the city. In fact, if you see this picture, you could say it was early in the morning (but it was around noon), or you could also think that it is another city (maybe a city like Detroit?). But not, it was Boston, 5 minutes away from crowded places like the Quincy Market.


After our short immersion in the Financial and China Town (small and without as much character as San Francisco's China Town), we came back to the trail and encountered the Old State House, the site where the Boston Massacre took place back in 1770. The house looks small and cute among the surrounding buildings.


Next to this is the place where apparently everybody has lunch in Boston, the Quincy market. It is a noisy, effervescent indoor market with numerous stalls that sell typical Bostonian food: italian style and seafood. Also outside there are many vendors, live music, outdoors restaurants... that made the whole scene very enjoyable.



Moving forth, on the river side we could see very nice sailboats, some of them are used as a Musuem for the American Revolution and the Tea Party. In them, you can even pretend to dump the British Tea to the river, like it happened more than 200 years ago.


Later than day, we spent some time aorund the very charming streets of Beacon Hill


The next day we spent in Cambridge. We started with a great Brunch in Cafe Luna, there are no pictures, but it is the place to have breakfast over there, everything was delicious. After that, we wanted to visit the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) museum. On our way, we saw that the MIT itself is a city with numerous research and development institutes, efficient measures to lower the energy consumption (we saw a few cogeneration plants on our way), and incredible architecture, like the buildings below.


After a couple of hours in the museum, we walked around the Harvard University. Unfortunately, the students had just graduated and the courses were finished, so it was empty, with not much to see.


We spent a pleasant afternoon around Cambridge, entering the crowded libraries with so much to offer, having coffee in a Spanish Cafe called Pamplona, and enjoying our last night away in general. I leave you with our last view of the city at night.



Thanks for reading,

Lita & Andres

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