Day 5 - September 3, 2001 Last updated: 9/3/01 8:30pm EDT
Today we took the subway in to Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT. We spent most of the day walking around (about 8 miles), looking at old houses. None are too historically significant except for the Longfellow house. This house was once home to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (best known for his poem about the midnight ride of Paul Revere). This mansion was built in 1759 and George Washington lived here during the siege of Boston from 1775 to 1776. Longfellow didn’t live here until the late 1830s. Unfortunately, the house has been closed since 1998 for renovations and it is not scheduled to reopen until spring of ’02.
That pretty much ends today’s activities. We walked past the Cambridge Historical Society, but they were closed too. We headed back to Boston, grabbed some books and went to read in the Common again. The weather has been pretty good. A little warmer today than yesterday (upper 70s), but the breeze makes it nice for sitting around outside and relaxing.
Dinner was at a dumpy little bar around the corner from our hotel called the Hub Pub. The food was quite good and relatively inexpensive. The place we originally had in mind was closed due to it being Labor Day today.
Since I didn’t write much today, I’ll take this opportunity to state some of my observations about this part of the world.
- These people are breakfast people. There are Dunkin Donut shops every two blocks. There are more Dunkin Donuts than Starbucks! And there’s another chain called Finagle A Bagel that is also all over the place. You can get sandwiches for lunch on bagels at both of these places.
- They are very polite drivers to pedestrians. They will stop and let you walk across the street, even if you are walking against the light and choosing to ignore them, they don’t honk.
- They must have incredible amounts of patience. There is awful traffic, yet they still drive.
- Nobody is out on the streets before 9 am.
- They talk funny. I thought they were Americans. 🙂