A lovely part of our Boston time was hanging out at home with loved ones. We had a particularly cosy evening making pasta and cupcakes (the latter in preparation for a birthday party). Only issue with baking before dinner is the temptation to snack on excellent cupcake mixture.
Maeve had the inspiration to make them epic chocolate. Vanilla is just a waste of space where chocolate should be.
We also played a whole heap of different games in the evenings. I particularly liked one called 'sounds like a plan', which is like Apples to Apples but in the form of advice. A task is laid out and you have to put in a piece of advice. The best one by far was 'how to date the most popular kid in school', where the winning card was 'don't even bother'. Too good.
In between family time, we did various touristy stuff. The above moment was a standout tourist moment. Not so much the food as Ellie making her home country proud. A sentence that was supposed to start with 'can you recommend a beer because...' somehow just became 'I'm Australian!' followed by confused polite silence from the waiter. Ellie is very proud of her nationality.
On another touristy day we were heading into town for a nice historical wander. Ellie just needed to do a quick detour to a makeup store, which natually resulted in this:
makeup is being applied, makeup is being browsed through, makeup is being bought.
An hour later we could continue on our way! Via Legal Seafoods because clam chowder is amazing (said the mostly vegetarian)
We then wandered as much of the Black Heritage trail as we could manage in the rain. It's an extension/cousin of the Freedom Trail, the main historical walk of Boston. This one takes you to a series of landmarks in the beautiful Beacon Hill neighbourhood that were part of the civil rights movement since Boston was founded.
Window boxes were full of real wintry plants, very fancy
We then visited the Afro American History Museum which was small but interesting, and really seemed to focus on the common continuing threads of activism that remain part of daily life in the US. Old posters warning people not to interact with the police (in case they participate in catching escaped slaves) were particularly striking.
We also had a tour of the old meeting house which was a school, shelter and church at various times. It was made so much more special by our fellow tourists, two women from NYC with amazing local accents
Before the tour started they spent 10 minutes interrogating the admissions desk guy - 'we've walked a really long way, where should we go after this, is it going to stop raining? No we don't really want Italian food, can you recommend anything over the other side of town? Is the ambience as nice there as at the Italian place we don't want to go to? How are the prices? And how do we get there? No we don't want to walk, how much for a cab? Oh you'll print off a map? Thankyou, how nice! Thanks for looking up the menu of that restaurant, can you show us a menu for the one across the street? Now was that directly across the street?'
They were also astonished to learn that slavery had ever existed in Massachustus, or anywhere in the north. The tour guide did a nice job of throwing out contrasting facts - MA was the first state to ban slavery, but one of the last to legalize interractial marriage. The ending of legal slavery also marked a wave of people selling slaves to southern states while they still could. Despite this he commented that many people still try to remember northen slavery as 'benign' because more enslaved people learned to read and write. While still being slaves. And then getting sold instead of freed. So benign.
These updates are now massively behind schedule so I'm posting this and then starting another one pronto. Ellie may come back and add more story to this one later so keep an eye on that!
