Cheese Steaks + Lotsa Independence

---

Steve and I were the only ones going to Philadelphia. We arrived around 2.30pm and quickly discovered that for some inexplicable reason, everything of interest in Philadelphia is closed on Tuesdays. So instead we just wandered around some gardens and monuments, which i admit was all very beautiful. Philadelphia is quite a pretty city. The only thing that we really achieved that day was going to Elfreth St, which is the oldest constantly inhabited street in the United States. It kind of looked like a miniature town un-shrunk. For dinner we had one of Philadelphia's specialties, cheese steak, which probably contrary to what you're imagining right now is shredded beef served in a bun with melted cheese (and optional fried onions). I proceeded to smother the whole thing in ketchup, leading it to taste kind of like a meat pie.

For our full day in Philadelphia, we started by heading over to City Hall which, in line with the everything's-closed-on-Tuesday attitude of Philadelphia was inexplicably only open from 2pm-4pm. So we decided to catch a subway to University of Pennsylvania, which was my first choice for university exchange. The college was really beautiful, and there was a really cool 'love' sculpture there by Robert Indiana. We wandered around for a bit, Steve took pictures of squirrels. Then we walked to 30th St station, which was a huge columned building which housed all the amtrak trains. It kind of reminded me a bit of Central Station in Sydney. We headed back into central Austin and went to Betsy Ross House, which is where the first American flag was made. It was pretty cool, they had an actor pretending to be Betsy Ross which is always fun, and a whole lot of 'Colonial myths' debunked on the wall. For example:

Myth: Ceilings in colonial times were lower because people were shorter back then
False: People in colonial times were on average only 1- 1.5 inches shorter than today. Ceilings were lower because it made it cheaper to heat the house (then it went on to list a whole bunch of old school Americans who were above 6 foot)

Myth: People in colonial times died really young
False: While the average life expectancy is 40 years old, this is because of high rates of infant mortality. In fact, if you made it past your 21st birthday, you were likely to live to at least 60. (And then it listed a whole bunch of people who lived past 80, including Betsy Ross.

Anyway, those little facts were probably my favourite part of the museum. After Betsy Ross we headed to the Constitution Centre, which had a great little propaganda performance (with really loud patriotic music playing and 'We the people' said over and over in voices with emphasis). There was an exhibition outlying the founding of the constitution, how it has been tested and changed over time, and people that have some sort of relationship to the constitution (but given the fact that Mickey Mouse was one of these 'people' due to constitutional disputes about copyright law I'd have to say that the links drawn were often a bit tentative). The best part of the museum though was probably the art of the soldiers exhibition, which displayed about 200 of over 16,000 painted by American embedded war artists since WWI. A lot of the artworks were very moving.

We had missed the 4pm closing time of City Hall so headed back to the hostel. That night was free pasta night- its always nice to get a free meal. It was also nice to meet the fellow Australian and the girl from Miami who were sitting at our table. That night we went to Philadelphia's apparent multitude of independent cinemas (according to the woman at the front desk independent cinemas are 'on every street corner on Chestnut St') and saw 'The King's Speech', because it was too cold to do something outside and too boring to stick around the hostel another night. It was great. The next morning it was onto Washington to start the roadtrip...

---