Before midnight: The Cleveland Cavaliers defeat and eliminate the Detroit Pistons to win the NBA Eastern Conference — they’ll face the San Antonio Spurs come Thursday from what I understand.
This morning I awoke a bit late in Boston in Richard and Amy’s house, showered, and as I got dressed I tore a whole in the right leg of my black pants. Richard patched it up for me, but I still need to buy some new trousers.
We went out to a Danish pastry shop near the Tufts (L&S) campus and then they drove me to a train station so I could head to town, which I did.
In Boston I started at the Harymarket subway stop and wandered around; there was a fruit, vegetable and fish market outside. A few “old fashioned” inns and taverns were to be found, clearly tourist attractions but also indicative, so it seems, of the old style of the neighborhood and streets. Nearby was Faneuil Hall / Quincy Hall Marketplace. Before “really” getting there I was near the intersection in a public park where a trio of Brits, at least two supposedly brother and sister, put on an acrobatic show, so I stuck around, watched, took lots of photographs, took part in some audience participation, etc. Then to the market proper, primarily to find a bathroom, which I managed. I could have spent much of the afternoon there, and it would have been a good place to end my stay, had I not needed to get back to South Station.
Instead I started following the “Freedom Trail” from there toward the Common, with lots of twists and turns along the way. The most relevant was at King’s Chapel, the oldest Anglican Church around and the first public school — the building itself was nice enough, but when I was about to leave the “guide” / “front desk” person asked if I had any other questions, we chatted a bit, and it came out that he’s a Madison grad from about 4 years ago, no a PhD student at Boston College in history, doing the Cold War. There was also, near a Borders, a couple statues and plaques set up in memory of the Irish Potato Famine. Closer to the Common I came to the cemetery where a number of famous Bostonians of the colonial and especially Revolutionary War period are buried, including Benjamin Franklin and Sam Adams. And Paul Revere. Back to the Common I went, familiar from yesterday, and after I was done with the Freedom Trail I made my way toward Newbury and the Back Bay, mostly down Boylston at first, but later Dartmouth to the water, down Beacon a bit, more of Newbury with a stop at a Borders for the bathroom, and back to the Starbucks I visited yesterday, but only after I first got a hotdog to satisfy my hunger. Ah, the Starbucks. I’ve never been a big fan of the chain, and their regular coffee is often a bit ‘burned,’ but the iced coffee is okay, and the reality is that each one is a separate entity and the people who work there can have personality and be interesting baristas. And I found an open wireless access point, so I was able to get online.
Two iced coffees later it had started to rain, was about 5pm, and it was time for me to head to South Station, get a ticket, and come back to New York.
The bus ride back was better than expected from a tourist perspective, for we drove by Fenway Park as the Red Sox were making a comeback against the Yankees; the park is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the freeway. We also went past Boston University; I saw that on Friday. We also drove sort of through or by Hartford, CT, and through New Haven (only after North Haven and Fair Haven, with West Haven yet to come … oh my).
Once back in NY I just walked back the way I’d come yesterday along canal. Most of the way back, near Broadway, three women stopped me for directions; they wanted the Manhattan Bridge, which more or less begins where the Fung Wah station is, so I told them what I knew. The 1 wasn’t running that far south this Saturday evening, so I caught a 2 to 14th, switched tracks, and caught a 1 north, getting myself a seat all the way.
Once I got “home” I finished off the last slice of pie from the pie I baked Thursday. On TV “Minority Report” was finishing, and once it was done we quickly grew tired of the bogus “Terror Plot at JFK Foiled” story — a handful of American Muslims with no known ties to Al Qaida, etc., sat around collecting info and thinking about ways of blowing things up at JFK. Clearly “not a good idea,” but we’re not talking about purchased supplies, an actual *plan* or anything concrete, and yet the news was making this out to be the next 9/11 … and not just FOX, but CBS … all the local affiliates. So we turned that crap off and found the end of the Cleveland-Detroit game.
Detroid could not buy a basket … brick, brick, brick … turnover … brick. Rasheed Wallace fouled out, argued, got a technical, argued, and got another T. Smart, Rasheed, really smart. And Detroit lost in a massacre.
