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I've been in the Boston area all week. Boston is pretty, and interesting, but sadly it's just not New York!
Three of the earliest (European) graveyards in North America are in Boston. You sure can tell that these folks were Puritans - lots of very plain headstones. Even the 1830's-foundation cemetery (Mount Auburn, which has to be visited for the scenery alone) has much more restrained monuments than burials of similar time period in England - there's the occasional angel statue, but it's 90% big headstones and obelisks. I really should get to work on some sort of article about the comparative funerary monuments of the Anglo-Saxon and Francophone worlds.
Downtown Boston is OK, but I prefer the area around Harvard. No one will be surprised that the most tempting bookstore I've ever found is in Harvard Square, but I was good and only bought some Latin American Spanish teaching materials. The Harvard University Press shop was another story, but even there I was pretty restrained, all things considered. They had a sale!
We've made some excursions. First, to Newport, Rhode Island, home of the vacation homes of the Astors, Vanderbilts and other wealthy people of the Robber Baron era. I was expecting big New England wooden structures, not 70-room Italianate marble extravaganzas! Still, we spent about 4 hours wandering around. Salve Regina University is the cutest private liberal arts college I've ever seen.
We did foliage-watching in Vermont. It was very pretty, but the high point of that day was the town of Brattleboro, VT. This place doesn't have a college, but it has all the funky subversive bookstores and cool coffee houses that one associates with the small American college town. For a reason the guidebooks don't cover, a lot of hippies ended up there in the sixties and the town has been a magnet for alternative types ever since. There was indeed a group of superannuated hippies raising money for Katrina relief across the street from the main radical book shop. It was the secondhand bookshop that did me in, though, and I cam away with metric goth-loads of Faulkner. Obsessive would have been buying the ones I've already read because they match.
Things we learned that day: Getting around New England is just like getting around England - there's too many people and everything takes too damn long. On top of that the roads are appalling. They blame winter, but we don't have roads that bad in Canada.
Yesterday we were supposed to be out on Martha's Vineyard, but the weather was bad and the friend who lives there was working, so we went to Salem instead. So did the rest of New England. I should have realized that when the guidebook said "Salem celebrates Halloween in style for the whole month of October" it meant "avoid like the plague". Anyway, we saw some pretty old houses (including the House of Seven Gables, where Hawthorne wrote the book of the same title) and had an excellent seafood lunch. I've never had clams that melt in your mouth before. Oh, and the plum flavoured tea got me, which we broke open last night, and it tastes as good as it smells.
Didn't sleep due to thunderstorm last night (a proper one, not the paltry ones we get in England) so may or may not go to the New England Aquarium this afternoon.
Three of the earliest (European) graveyards in North America are in Boston. You sure can tell that these folks were Puritans - lots of very plain headstones. Even the 1830's-foundation cemetery (Mount Auburn, which has to be visited for the scenery alone) has much more restrained monuments than burials of similar time period in England - there's the occasional angel statue, but it's 90% big headstones and obelisks. I really should get to work on some sort of article about the comparative funerary monuments of the Anglo-Saxon and Francophone worlds.
Downtown Boston is OK, but I prefer the area around Harvard. No one will be surprised that the most tempting bookstore I've ever found is in Harvard Square, but I was good and only bought some Latin American Spanish teaching materials. The Harvard University Press shop was another story, but even there I was pretty restrained, all things considered. They had a sale!
We've made some excursions. First, to Newport, Rhode Island, home of the vacation homes of the Astors, Vanderbilts and other wealthy people of the Robber Baron era. I was expecting big New England wooden structures, not 70-room Italianate marble extravaganzas! Still, we spent about 4 hours wandering around. Salve Regina University is the cutest private liberal arts college I've ever seen.
We did foliage-watching in Vermont. It was very pretty, but the high point of that day was the town of Brattleboro, VT. This place doesn't have a college, but it has all the funky subversive bookstores and cool coffee houses that one associates with the small American college town. For a reason the guidebooks don't cover, a lot of hippies ended up there in the sixties and the town has been a magnet for alternative types ever since. There was indeed a group of superannuated hippies raising money for Katrina relief across the street from the main radical book shop. It was the secondhand bookshop that did me in, though, and I cam away with metric goth-loads of Faulkner. Obsessive would have been buying the ones I've already read because they match.
Things we learned that day: Getting around New England is just like getting around England - there's too many people and everything takes too damn long. On top of that the roads are appalling. They blame winter, but we don't have roads that bad in Canada.
Yesterday we were supposed to be out on Martha's Vineyard, but the weather was bad and the friend who lives there was working, so we went to Salem instead. So did the rest of New England. I should have realized that when the guidebook said "Salem celebrates Halloween in style for the whole month of October" it meant "avoid like the plague". Anyway, we saw some pretty old houses (including the House of Seven Gables, where Hawthorne wrote the book of the same title) and had an excellent seafood lunch. I've never had clams that melt in your mouth before. Oh, and the plum flavoured tea got me, which we broke open last night, and it tastes as good as it smells.
Didn't sleep due to thunderstorm last night (a proper one, not the paltry ones we get in England) so may or may not go to the New England Aquarium this afternoon.
