Cheers to Boston!

Right…so when we left you last time we had flown into the Washington DC in style, Business Class and all.

Well, our feelings turned sour quite quickly…. As we mentioned we decided not to cash in the vouchers we were given in Copenhagen on advice from the staff there. They told us we should wait and cash it in and get US Dollars straight away instead of having to go through the procedure of changing from the Danish Krona to Dollars. Well, as soon as we landed we found a ticket office for Scandinavian Airlines and told them we wanted some money!! But…. we couldn’t, we were told that they don’t cash in the vouchers anymore and that we have to call an 1-800 number, write in and eventually the money would be sent into a checking account. We told them that we don’t have a bank account here in the states but they didn’t seem to care about that. Not happy!! I’ts good thing the vouchers are valid for a year, we’ll get the money eventually…

Since there wasn’t anything else we could do we found a taxi and just left to our hotel. Our next flight was early the next morning (just for a change) so we didn’t have time to see DC this time and we just stayed the night at a local hotel near Dulles Airport.

Early the next morning we caught the free shuttle ride into the airport for our next flight, this time it was a domestic flight. The plane was sheduled to leave at 9am so we thought 2 hours before the flight should be more than enough time to be at the airport. Once we got there we saw that we were wrong.

Neither Suz or I have ever seen such chaos in any airport before (and both of us have seen quite a few airports combined), the lines were HUGE, there were several of them and not anywhere did we see clearly as to where to go. After standing in the wrong line for about 15 min we finally found the right one. And here we stayed in line for TWO hours. By the time we got to the desk we had missed the plane, but the lady behind the desk just told us that she would put us on the 10am flight instead. When we asked if that plane had any seats available she just pointed to the line behind us and said: “Most of the people flying the 10am flight are in this line and will miss the flight”.

We were just happy to get on a flight so soon, specially since some people were almost reaching riot mood. After being picked out in the security check, thoroughly searched, we were allowed to continue and catch our flight. Not a good start to our visit in the US.

Anyways, with no more hickups we landed in Boston, collected our luggage and made our way into the city and to the Hostel where we were to spend our two nights. On the subway ride over to the Hostel the train was packed! And after looking around at the people and where the subway was going we knew why….the Red Sox (Boston’s Baseball team) were playing that day and nothing is bigger in Boston than the Red Sox.

The hostel turned out to be quite nice, we checked in, stored our luggage away and made it into the city centre. The subway was packed in this direction as well…..with Red Sox fans as well……now wait a minute, how can there be fans going in both directions at the same time. The only reason for it must be that the one’s without a ticket go into the city to watch the game at a pub…..and here it hit me, if everyone is so into Baseball we might have some difficulty in finding a place where we could watch the World Cup, more about this later on…

Our first stop was the Quincy Market which is a shopping and dining complex, we walked around the area looking for a place to eat. We eventually just decide to act touristic so we entered one of two Cheers bars in the city. We were told that we had to wait for at least 20min for a table to clear up but we could wait by the bar…. that’s fine with us. After waiting for the bartender for 5min he took our order, a Root beer for Suz and a local Sam Adams beer for me. He asked me for ID for the beer (I wasn’t aware that I look younger than 21) so I showed him my Swedish drivers licence, he looked at it and asked me if I had my passport with me, I didn’t so he said that he couldn’t serve me……you have got to be kidding me!?! My licence has my photo and date of birth on it but he said he couldn’t accept it……only in America!!

This was just to much so we just left the place, and now I was on the lookout for another place where we could eat…..and get a beer (not so much because I needed it but more as a matter of fact). We walked along the freedom trail back to it’s beginning. Along the way we passed such sights as The Old State House which is quite a sight….an old building in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers. We also passed The Burying Ground, which is Boston’s oldest cementary, we also saw another old cementary, Granary Burying Ground, where people like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams are buried.

We almost made it to the city park, Boston Common, without finding a place to eat, have a beer and watch the World Cup and now we just went back towards Quincy Market. The Freedom Trail then took us past an area with lots of Irish pubs and here we found the place we were looking for, big screens (and no baseball on them either), good pub food and a place where they accepted our id’s…..perfect!

After eating and watching a game which contained lots and lots of cards (Netherlands vs Portugal) we walked across the street where 6 glass towers follow each other. This is a Holocaust Memorial where every tower represents one of the six concentration camps. All the towers are made out of glass and all of them have the prisoners numbers engraved all over them.

From here we made our way back to the Boston Common, here we got to see the Massachusetts State House, it’s dome is sheaded in copper and gold and serves as the zero mile marker for Massachusetts. We continued walking along Beacon Hill which is Bostons most picturesque neighborhood. Along the way we found the original pub which was used for the TV series Cheers. Only the front was used though as the inside looks totally different.

We made our way back to our hostel where we spent the rest of the day reading about what we could do and see the next day.

We started our second day in Boston by following the freedom trail onto the North End. Since Australia was to play against Italy we thought it could be fun to catch the game in Little Italy. But after talking to some people and asking for a nice pub in which to watch the game, we decided to walk back to the Irish pub section for the game. The biggest reason was that we got a very unfriendly reception by all Italians…

We had lunch and watched the game and we actually thought that Australia would make extra time, Suz even mentioned: “Well, at least we took the Italians to extra time” when the ref decided to give the Italians an early Christmas present, in the 93rd minuted, around 5 seconds before the game was to go to extra time they get a penalty……The Italian Grosso should recieve an Oscar award as well for “Best Dive during a World Cup Game”. The worst thing about all of this was that we now were going to follow the freedom trail, and it goes straight through Little Italy…..Not fun!!

We made our way through North End, saw the statue of Paul Revere and the Old North Church before we crossed the bridge over to Charlestown. The freedom trail took us to the Navy Yard where the oldest commissioned warship is still afloat, the USS Constitution, unfortunately for us, it was closed during the day we were there and we couldn’t go on board. Lucky for us though there is also a destroyer there from the 2nd World War, the USS Cassin Young. We went aboard and had a quick look, quite interesting to see. Very small areas for so many people….

After visiting the Navy Yard we continued on towards the end of the Freedom Trail at the Bunker Hill Monument…..as our luck would have it we could’t climb it either since they were restoring it and it was closed down. Well, well what can you do. We ended up getting the subway back to the city and then out to Harvard.

We went straight to Harvard Yard where we found the statue of John Harvard, it’s supposed to mean good luck to rub his left shoe. So many people have rubbed the shoe, that it’s really shiny compared to the rest of the statue (I guess that all the students rub the shoe before they go and take the tests).

On the way back into the city we crossed the Longfellow Bridge, caught some good views of the city and made it to Chinatown where we just strolled around for a while aimlessly. Not too long after that we caught the subway back to our hostel and had an early night. Once more we were up early the next morning, made our way to the airport and flew on towards our next destination, Montreal…..

We really liked Boston, the city is quite small so our two days here were more than enough to explore what we wanted to see. It’s also a very nice city to walk in, the streets are quite small so it’s not really designed for traffic. And it’s one of the few cities in the US where you actually feel a bit of history…