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Published: October 2nd 2011
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Even though we had a pretty late night, we were up nice and early at around 8am, as we didn't want to miss our free breakfast, which ends at 10am on the weekend (it ends at 9am on weekdays, so lots of early wake-ups for us this week!).
Emma went and had a shower first, then Craig did the same a short while after. Once we were ready, we went down to the dining room (which seems to be in the basement as it's on the floor underneath the lobby) and had a look at what was available. Emma went for a bowl of cereal whilst Craig sampled some of the hot food available, ending up with a piece of French toast (which was way too sweet), a few rashers of bacon, some breakfast potatoes and a flat, burger-shaped sausage. On the way to sit down at a table, we passed the juice machine, so grabbed a glass of orange juice.
Once we had finished eating, we came back up to the room for a while. Emma played on the netbook and wrote the blog for the previous couple of days, whilst Craig had a nap. By about 12:30pm,
we decided that we should go out and start exploring the city of Boston. This was the first place that neither of us had been to before, so it was all new to us, and we weren't really sure where to start! We looked at the map that the lady had given us when we checked in, and decided to head for the city hall area.
We left the hostel and checked the map to find out which way to go to get to the nearest subway station. We reached Back Bay station around 10 minutes later and walked over to the ticket machines, each purchasing a seven day pass for $15. We then caught the orange line to State station, and walked up the steps onto the street above. We had a little look around the immediate area, noticing a large crowd of people (who we assume to have been on a tour - which was confirmed when a guy dressed as an old, colonial-time soldier starting giving a talk about the building) taking pictures of a large building, which turned out to be the old State house. We took a few pictures ourselves, but then decided that
we would try not to take pictures of the historical buildings until we did the 'Freedom Trail' - basically a self-guided tour of the history of Boston and its role in shaping the independence of America.
We spotted a visitor centre, so walked in and browsed through the various leaflets for the attractions in Boston. Most of them were for tours, museums and art galleries, but we did pick up a leaflet which listed pretty much all of the names and locations of the attractions, as they are all included in the (very high!) price of one card that you can purchase. We left the visitor centre and headed towards the city hall. As we got closer, Craig was delighted to see that there was some sort of car show in front of the entrance. We walked around all of the old classic, American cars and took some pictures.
We were getting a bit hungry by this point (it was around 2pm), so we decided to find somewhere to eat. We walked around and eventually found an area full of shops, with a food court located inside one of the buildings. We looked at the different eatieries inside,
with Craig settling on a Bacon McDouble with fries from McDonalds, and Emma going for a pork chow mein from a Chinese place. Unfortunately, when Emma opened up her polystyrene tray, the 'chow mein' turned our to be a huge pile of beansprouts and small bits of strange-looking pieces of pork, covered in some sort of savoury white sauce, with rice on the side - no noodles?! She tried a few of the beansprouts, but ended up leaving most of it and just eating the rice.
Once we had finished eating, we went back on the street and had a look around some of the shops that were around. It was nice to be abe to walk around without seeing loads of homeless/mentally ill people roaming the streets and asking for money. Even the bins are designed to stop people from going through them, which we saw happen so often in San Francisco! Most of the buildings are red-brick and there are loads of trees around, and we agreed that it's true what we have heard from most people that have been to Boston - it's just a really nice place!
We looked on the map and decided
to head towards the waterfront. There was a subway stop by the aquarium, so we headed there, using the orange line then transferring onto the blue line. We got off and walked towards the wharf, where we could see lots of boats lining the docks. We found a bench and just sat watching the boats and ferries go by for a while. There were also some kids (who we assumed to be in sort of dance group as they were all dressed similarly) having some professional photos taken in front of the water.
We took some photos of our surrondings and of ourselves, before heading back to the subway station and back to the hostel. Once there, we took a couple of pictures of the area around the hostel, which looks like your typical leafy red-brick Boston street, and we also spotted a squirrel in a tree, which we also snapped a photo of. We went back up to our room for a little while, looking on the internet at the various attractions and their prices. We had got a bit excited as one of the leaflets showed that Six Flags New England (a big theme park) wasn't too
far away, however, after looking at how we would get there, google maps showed it to be around 95 miles away - clearly the label on the map was completely wrong, as it had showed it to be around 2 miles away! With that idea out of the window, we figured that we will just have a more relaxing week, before we go to New York next week, which we are sure will be much more hectic and busy!
For tea, we popped over to the 7-Eleven right opposite the hostel and grabbed a $2 chilli-dog each, bringing it back to the room to eat. We then spent most of the night on the netbook or reading, eventually going to bed at around 12am.
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