We have to pack and leave in a few hours, so: highlights.
Wednesday. Fancy macarons and pastries at a coffee shop on Newbury Street:
Boston Common and Public Garden:
That was a long walk, which we capped off by another longish one back to the North End for Italian food (dinner for lunch, as Mark put it). Another thing we have learned about sightseeing with small people is that it pays to have a large and somewhat lengthy lunch for a good break in the sightseeing day, and then the afternoon siesta.
We ordered a very pasta and meat-heavy lunch. I am not sure why we didn’t mix it up a little with some salad. Likely because everybody wanted something different when it came to the pasta and pizza. Gnocchi, rigatoni with sausage, arancini, sausage-and-red-onion pizza, meatballs. The arancini were really wonderful. I am at a loss to understand why they cannot be had on restaurant menus wherever there is both risotto and deep-frying.
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Later, the 9yo wanted someone to take him to the Bunker Hill monument which is not far from where we are staying, so I dragged myself out of my nap and we went up together. It was the hottest day of our week, and the place was not crowded.
It’s a bit of a hike on the hilly streets of Charlestown, and then when you get there you can climb 294 stairs to the top.
Just as at most of the museums, I could have spent a lot longer at this one than the child accompanying me had patience for. It is a tiny one, but has a nice big diorama with an audible narration that illuminates different parts of the battlefield and different groups of teeny soldiers as it recounts the tale. There are also loads of then-and-now maps. I am endlessly fascinated by trying to see, in the paper maps of my youth and the zoom-and-swipe roadmaps on my phone, the vestiges of the past: the Roman castra in a tiny gridded square of streets in an Italian town, the bridges across the Thames.
Our own city is not very old as a city and likes to demolish old buildings anyway; but I am told that some of the odd-angled roads date back to old, old footpaths between river and lakes, older than the arrival of the men the streets are named for. That is a history worth knowing more about.
Anyway: Boston has a longer history as a paved place than the Twin Cities, although the hills have been made low and much land made out of fill in the harbor, and it is fun to pick out recognizable features. The old maps show a forked road along the Charlestown Neck that used to connect this little peninsula to the mainland; there is still a big forked road following what looks like the same path, although the neck has thickened, and you can use it on the map to find landmarks. The very top of the real Bunker Hill, for instance (I can’t be the only one who, in elementary school, stored away factoids about the famous parts of the battle being on Breed’s Hill, right?). There is a church there, and a cemetery, and for that reason it didn’t get carved up like the rest of Charlestown. Little things like that.
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I went shopping and bought vegetables and made dinner in the apartment, a coconut red curry soup with spirally wheat noodles and tofu and a bit of shrimp and lots of crisp vegetables on top. So everyone got to rest, and eat food that was the exact opposite of the heavy Italian lunch. And I got to make the food myself, something that I need to do every few days, it seems, even on vacation.
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