Traveling with Michelle: A Beautiful Day in Beantown!

June 19. Today is our 20th Anniversary--we spent it doing a college tour and following the Freedom Trail! :) Lots of photos today--enough to make up for yesterday! Sunny day--perfect temperature!! We took the orange line train downtown to Chinatown and got to the right place for our Emerson College tour 10 minutes early!! The college is compact--all of the buildings are in about a 2 city block area. We spent half an hour with the admissions counselor then an hour and a half with two students walking around. The equipment seems nice enough, and there are a lot of performance spaces and co-curricular activities to get involved in every area of the arts. We got to see a dorm room--pretty plush compared to what I had in college! It had three double rooms that share a common room and kitchenette area with a sink (you supply the fridge and microwave). And freshman and sophomores are required to live in the dorms. The students and the admissions counselor mentioned that if you've completed level 3 of a foreign language in your high school, you are exempted from the language requirement (which is nice), but the thing that bothered me, was that the students said that if you have taken 4 years of math with at least a C+ average, you are exempted from your math requirement! So doing 4 years of C+ work at the high school level is commensurate with completing their general education requirement for math?? And the science classes are very much science for arts students. Such as the science of severe weather. Really?? Granted, an arts major isn't going to need a lot of math or science, but, in my opinion, it kind of waters down the BA or BFA. (Though light and sound technicians do get the physics of light and sound in their foundations classes). Oh well, Anneliese will decide which school fits her best, and we still have several others to look at.

Anneliese with the Emerson banner behind her.

After the tour and a family discussion about it in the Boston Common, we were ready to see the city.

In the Common, reviewing the tour.

Boston Common

Had to add a playground stop!

Mosaic detail from the tadpole playground arch.

A tiny street in Beacon Hill (note the gas-powered lamps!)

More Beacon Hill

We walked to the Old North Church and found the Freedom Trail and followed it back to the Boston Common (we just left off a bit past the Church such as the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill memorial).

This is the Freedom Trail--a brick pathway through the city.

The spire of the Old North Church

Joshua

The inside of the Old North Church

Pews in the Old North Chuch. Families bought them, then furnished them
themselves. They brought in benches, chairs, blankets, pillows, and little
floor heaters. The high walls were to cut down on cold drafts in the old churches.

We didn't go into Paul Revere's house, but went inside most of the others that we could go into. The Granary Burying Ground was very interesting. I listened in on part of a tour being given and evidently the markers aren't actually where they are supposed to be (except for the patriots). They originally weren't placed very deeply and whenver the area flooded, the markers floated away to the river, then were returned to wherever the person returning it wanted to put it.

Street art--things in broze in the crosswalk--vegetables, combs, newspapers.

detail of crosswalk art

Costumed tour guides are posted along the trail to give more information

The Granary Burying Ground

The trail also cuts through a little park that was created when I-93 was moved. It used to go through the city about 4 stories up (kind of like Toronto). But then they decided to build a tunnel for the freeway and put greenspace above it. Cute little park which we too a break in (photos below). When we were there, we saw about 12 children running through the water (which is only a few millimeters deep). Some of them were in swimsuits and had towels, sandbuckets, and beach balls with them. Part of me said, wow, arent' they cute. But another part of me said, this is a public fountain, not a beach or wading pool; the towels and beach towels there made it worse. Anneliese reminded me that some of these children may live in apartments and not have access to public wading pools or to the beach or a spot of yard to set up a small wading pool. Hmmmm. Maybe I just need to be less judgemental sometimes.

The little park above the freeway

Pretty flowers in the park

Faneuil Hall

King's Chapel

Very plush pews for those Anglicans!

Old State House

From a memorial of the Great Potato Famine in Ireland because many people
who emigrated came to Boston.

I think these are the ones that did not emigrate and died of starvation--
except the boy in red--he's had plenty of food!

This is in front of the Old City Hall-it says Stand in Opposition (with footprints)--so Shelby is!

This is a marker on School St. on the site of the first public school
in the United States. It is a beautiful mosaic of letters, numbers, pictures for each letter,
and children learning and playing.

Detail from the school site marker.

After returning to the Common, we tried to take a swan boat ride, but they were closed--at 4:30. :( So Randy and I walked up and down Commonwealth looking at the row houses while the children talked to the ducks and rested their feet in the Common.

From the book Make Way for Ducklings. (Yes, someone put Bruins jersies
on each duck for the Stanley Cup hockey games going on.

They cut an archway for the path, there is a fountain in the center

A real swan

The swan boats

The pond--there is a ramp for the ducks to walk up to get on that island in the middle!

A fountain

Row houses on Commonwealth Avenue--very nice ones.

Beatiful detail in this row house

Even the doors are curved to fit the tower!

Then we walked to Chinatown to find "authentic" Asian food for dinner. We did, and I even learned to eat with chopsticks and ate my whole dinner with them and drank the tea (which was very strong and tasted strongly of tea leaves, maybe it steeped too long?).