Boston finale

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Oh boy is it hot here, 30C and all sunshine. Its been along time since I have had a face full of dripping sweat!
Also it feels bizzare being back here now - as you know the place was flooding nearly 3 weeks ago when I arrived from Manchester. I had a walk around Boston Common and the lakes have returned to their normal levels and the city is really busy now with all the good weather drawing in the tourist gravy train. However, I had the pleasures of the subway today - which normally would be hot and stuffy but the blazing heat that is cooking the surface people made it seem more pleasent below!

I have had a big interest in John F Kennedy for about 4 years and so I was excited by the opportunity to visit his SHRINE er sorry.... museam near Boston harbour. But seriously it was really interesting and I learned a few details I was rather amazed by i.e. that at 21 during a student placement in France he visited Poland, Moscow and Berlin during summer 1938 - i.e. during the height of Stalins Russia, Hitlers Germany and a year before the Nazis invaded Poland. It certainly puts into context modern 'Gap Years' and also the fact one of the most crucial aspects of his presidential career was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 where the USA 'played chicken' with USSR over cuba; going eye ball to eye ball to see who would blink first!

After that JFK delight, I took the subway to Harvard square in Cambridge; well as you would expect for a typical tourist University town - read St Andrews, Oxbridge - you got all the nice buildings, University memorobillia and plenty of tourists falling overthemselves in trying to photograph everything! I decided to escape this and walk down the quiet and cooler banks of the River Charles; which devides Cambridge from Boston, this led me nicely to MIT the great technical institute of science and engineering/ I then met up with a friend of Marcus from Pakistan who is a student there.

Today (2nd) I briefly visited the Afroamerican museam of Boston and the science museam later in the afternoon. I didn't realise Black americans had a better life in Boston during the late 18th century compared with other states and slavery was baned by 1783.

Well I think this more or less rounds of the first James Lymer alternative tour of USA. And all of you that I asked to come, you know what you have missed!

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