It seems to be a general consensus that Boston has the best of all fireworks in US. Well, atleast Bostonians think that way, just like a New Yorker would think that the Empire State is the tallest building in the world, not realizing that he/she is talking of the 1931 s. Not aware of this fact, my husband and I had planned a casual get away to Boston for the July 4th long weekend.
And here is our trip report!
1) Travel: Booked a Chrysler sebring convertible (convertibles - my latest passion) with thrifty in Boston at a nominal price - 80 bucks a day [all inclusive], only to find the car being unavailable. Tried our best to pain the rental guy and he finally gave up on our stubbornness and got us one.
2)Tourist Places: We had few places in mind that we wanted to see-Charles River, NewBury Street, Quincy Market, Boston Downtown, blah blah.. and ofcourse Hardvard and MIT as I am one among their all time prospective students. Common who doesn't want to study there?! If given a chance, I wouldn't mind giving up my IT career for a Music and Theatre Arts degree in any of those univs! Naah.. not so desperate:-)
3)Journey: July 3rd, Beautiful sunny day, spent half day in journey and paining the rental guy in Boston. Poor guy he was so nice and polite. We felt we were finally in the US!! The culture is so different in NJ/NY. People just take you for granted. Anyway, not to digress further, we took the convertible and went to Holiday Inn, where we stayed. Slept all evening and night and finally got up next morning and realized we had wasted one whole day already.
4) Charles River: July 4th, had a typical american breakfast at the hotel and headed off in our flaunting convertible to Boston's Newbury street - a trendy shopping district lined up with historic brownstones with hundreds of shops and restaurants. A popular destination for tourists and locals. Lovely building architecture, felt like we were in Europe or some other country and not in US. And yeah, we were not at all surprised to find indian restaurants in that area. Closeby there was a river surrounded by beautiful grass where people had set up their camping tents and were playing cards, gosipping, barbequing.
After an hour or so, I started complaining to my husband that we weren't seeing any tourist spots and were visiting all unimportant places. So I finally started googling on my iphone to figure out where we were and found that we were sitting on Charles River, a famous tourist spot, no wonder there were 100's of people :). The harvard Bridge - connection between Boston and Cambridge was right there and finally we understood that the fireworks will be held here.
5) Beach: Hubby wanting to visit one of the Boston Harbor islands, which was pretty far from where we were, so we searched for the nearest beach and our dear GPS decided to take us to some random beach in Boston. Its called Winthrop beach and I would tag it as a local town beach sort of thing, Although, nothing great about it... beaches are always fun.
6) Driving in Boston - Countless number of times we drove through either a bridge or a tunnel. We were never on a straight single road for more than a few seconds and roads were like a roller coaster ride and I am pretty sure that except in the downtown area, almost every road in Boston is a bridge high up in the air or a tunnel under the rivers and lakes!!
7)Quincy Market - once again a shopping and dining place. It was all crowded with tourists, surrounded by nice shops, restaurants serving the best junk food possible :) and we did not miss the opportunity to enjoy both!
8)Boston Pop's & Fireworks - For anyone planning to visit the Charles River for the fireworks in future, a word of caution, please do not go by car and instead use the local trains in Boston. We took our car and couldn't find any parking spot on the road even within a radius of 3-4 miles of the river. After half an hour of hunting for a parking spot, we decided to donate 10 bucks to one of the public parking garages there. We reached an hour before the fireworks were to begin, hence did nothing but stared at the American flag floating in the dark sky, and started feeling nostalgic, wondering if we ever took so much trouble just to celebrate India's independence day!!
The americans started singing their national anthem and other songs, I was surprised to hear my hubby singing along with them, only to realise that he was singing his school song that is basically the song God Bless America, just the one word 'America' was replaced by his school's name!! You know...It requires real talent to pick an already composed song among the millions avaiable in the world and then fit it to your own purpose and everybody knows how talented Indians are in such things :-)
Fireworks began and the ooh's and the aah's started. No doubt it was beautiful but after having celebrating Diwali for more than 20 years in India, where you hold the crackers in your own hands and throw them on the ground just a second before they light up.... it was kind of boring to just stand and stare at the sky, although beautiful. We were there for about 20 minutes and the fun was over for us.Went back to the hotel and slept.
9)Harvard and MIT:Harvard has a very beautiful campus with buildings along the Charles river. Visited the main HBS building and some random ones around. MIT, saw the main building, took a few snaps and while we were there, we saw a family and a chinese guy standing and staring at the MIT campus map. The american guy was asking the chinese guy, innocent questions such as why MIT is not an Ivy league. And the chinese guy almost shouting at him telling that he is not the founder of MIT to know answers to such questions. Heard their conversation for some time, had a hearty laugh and started the journey back home.
All in all, its a nice place, but nothing can beat NY and India !!!:-)
