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Published: October 3rd 2011
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Today, we woke up with no real plans to do anything. We were up at around 8am again to be ready in time to have breakfast, and we headed down to the dining room at about 9:15. We both had cereal today (Craig took a couple of his lactase pills so that he could have the milk) and some orange juice.
On the way back to the room in the elevator, we noticed on the events calendar that there was a free event taking place today in Harvard Square, celebrating 'Oktoberfest'. We had heard of this before; it's basically a traditionally German beer festival that is held in the first week of October. We're not too sure on the history of why it's celebrated, and how it's spread to cities such as Boston, but as it is a chance to go and see live music, eat food and just enjoy the atmosphere, we thought that we should head there today!
We saw that the event wouldn't actually begin in Harvard Square until around 1pm, so we decided to just relax in the room for a while until a bit later in the afternoon. Emma had a little snooze while
Craig played on the netbook and watched some videos (mainly of Minecraft) on YouTube. Before leaving, we had a quick check on google maps for where we had to go, then left the hostel at around 2:30pm.
We caught the orange line to Community College station, but when we got off we realised that we weren't really too sure which way we needed to go. We asked a woman in the street how to get to Harvard Square, who wasn't too sure and suggested that we ask a member of staff in the subway station. Following her advice, we asked a man in an information booth, who said that we should catch the subway back a couple of stops, and get on the red line, which would take us straight to Harvard Square.
By the time we reached the square, it was around 3:30, so we wasted no time in looking around the different stalls. All of the roads were closed, so everyone was free to walk where they wanted, rather than try to all just walk on the pavement (which was good as it was very busy!). The stalls sold various items, such as hats (similar to
the ones that you find at the German Market that they have in Birmingham around Christmas), arts and crafts, clothing and jewellery. There were also plenty of food stalls, selling food from all different places from around the world, such as Thai cuisine, Chinese food, Indian food, Caribbean-style jerk chicken, and more typical American foods such as hot-dogs, pork/beef sandwiches and burgers. There were also a few beer/BBQ gardens around, which looked very full!
We were pretty hungry, so we looked through the stalls to find something to eat. Emma had a pulled pork sandwich, whilst Craig had a tray of five ribs, all of which had plenty of meat on them - yum! Once we had finished, we could hear a band playing just down the street, so we followed the noise to where a large crowd of people were standing watching (or sitting in trees, as some were!). The band were a marching band called 'Minor Mishap', but they didn't play the traditional music that you would expect from a marching band, instead adopting a more jazz/ska sound, which sounded awesome, and had many heads nodding along to their music (others were literally jumping/dancing around). We took
some pictures and videos of the band; we uploaded one of the videos to YouTube, which you can see at the following link:
We continued walking round, watching some other bands play, and some of the street entertainers, such as people walking around on stilts, a guy blowing HUGE bubbles with a piece of rope tied together on sticks and a group of people making music from ordinary metal pipes and things that you would find around the home. There was also a wall that we passed that was full of post-it notes, on which people had written things that make them happy, which we took some photos of.
We left Oktoberfest at around 6pm, and headed back to the subway station, catching the red line, followed by the orange line, to get back to our hostel. On the short walk back to the building, we popped into a CVS pharmacy just around the corner from the station, where we bought some chocolate and a small pack of mini donuts, as we didn't really fancy much for our tea. We got back to the room, where we spent the night reading our books and playing on
the netbook.
Depending on what the weather is looking like tomorrow, we may walk the Freedom Trail or take a trip to Boston Common!
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