Day 4 – Boston Calling

Check out photos link on the home page for more photos. (Coming soon)

Where do I start..

Boston is amazing, vibrant and is one of the oldest cities in the USA. I know that for most Europeans this means that it was founded sometime last Wednesday, but actually it’s starting to put on some serious mileage. Founded in 1630 and originally called Tremontaine, the puritans renamed it Boston after the town in England, where most of them came from.

I love the old mixed with the new here, a 400 year old church steeple overshadowed by a skyscraper puts the difference into perspective.

The Americans are really friendly and not at all loud and in your face. Perhaps it’s just the ones you meet on holidays in Europe that are like that. Here in their ‘natural habitat’ so to speak they seem pretty chilled out. Maybe it’s just Boston, I’ll soon find out.

The food is fabulous, the choice incredible. I walked through a food street market today, there were noodle stalls, seafood, lobster, crab and clam chowder, huge burgers, Greek meze, Mexican. Sushi and sashimi stalls and oyster bars. Italian trattorias, falafels and hot dogs with dozens of relishes. I’m going to have to up my intake to 4 meals a day.

There are lots of bakeries too, all of them have queues running down the street. Mike’s Pastry was the busiest selling Cannoli by the bucket load. It seemed that almost everyone I passed within a block or two of the shop was carrying a box full of them.

My plan today is to walk the freedom trail, which takes in all the historic parts of Boston and starts at Boston Common. I won’t go through all the different points of interest, otherwise I’ll spend all day typing. They were busy laying down the ice skating rink on the common as I walked by, one useful feature I saw was that you can get your skates sharpened. That would have come in useful the other day when I was skating in Belfast at the home of the Belfast Giants. Our skates were blunt and skidded a lot on the ice.

The Granary burying ground was very interesting and is the final resting place of Samuel Adams one of the founding fathers, but more of him later. Apparently if you count up all the names on all the headstones (many have multiple names on them) there are over 2000 buried there. In fact though most couldn’t afford headstones and there are actually around 10,000 buried there. If you saw the size of the area you wouldn’t believe it.

The rain was drizzling down most of the day and so as a respite from the weather and to dry off a bit I popped into the Samuel Adams Boston Taproom. (See I did mention him again!) Just by the site of the Boston Massacre and several markets, there are numerous stainless steel vats and a long rack of beer pumps taking the brew directly from the barrels. There is a tasting menu of beers again all quite strong. I got chatting to a couple on holiday from Miami and as I will be heading there at some point and they gave me the low down on what to do there.

For lunch I stopped at in indoor market and had some of their famous homemade chowder. Although it was served in a styrofoam bowl it was excellent. My first clam chowder and my first ‘greenbacks’.

I didn’t finish the trail today as it crosses over the river to Bunker hill and the rain was still drizzling away, although it isn’t particularly cold. I’ll finish it tomorrow.

I wandered around the Italian quarter and Chinatown for a while before heading back to my hotel to get ready for this evening. I am heading over to Back Bay to a Jazz club called the Beehive. Apparently one of the top 100 Jazz clubs worldwide.

I arrived at the Beehive, it’s on 2 floors with a mezzanine, low lighting and 2 bars. Lots of little tables are dotted around and the place was packed. My table wasn’t quite ready so I sat at the bar and fell into conversation with a couple of plumbers from across the river. Seems like plumbers are as much in demand in Boston as they are in the UK.

The singer Nadia Washington was really good, but there was an awful lot of solo’s by each musician in the band spiralling away off into the ether endlessly. I definitely prefer the blues. To eat, I just kept it simple and had a burger with fries and salad. The burger was superb as is everything I’ve tried so far.