When I booked this holiday, I was conscious of making sure we had "enough" time in each place, and that we weren't feeling like we were always at airports. That had been a flaw with our previous trips. While I don't regret that decision at all as it has allowed us to relax, when Aaron commented over dinner tonight that it felt like our Philadelphia journey was complete and that it felt like it should be the last night here, I had to agree. I think we'll just end up shopping or something tomorrow.
That's not to say we haven't liked Philadelphia, we have (I think Philadelphia is what I so wanted Boston to be), but we're clearly here at a good time for touring, as everything is open but there's not a lot of tourists, so short lines etc have meant we've had no problems booking tours or long queues etc, and our hotel is smack bang next to the Independence Square area, so not even a lot of travelling time. We've covered everything we've wanted to do as a result.
Today was a fairly casual day. After lazing around for the first morning of our trip, we headed to the National Constitution Center. We actually spent almost all of our time there in a special Bruce Springsteen exhibition they had on. We're not even huge Springsteen fans (although we do like him) and not a lot of time in the actual constitution bit. The Springsteen exhibition was really good because it was genuine memorabilia, including the notebooks in which he had drafted lyrics to all of his songs. My favourite piece was the Oscar for the song Streets of Philadelphia which is one of my favourite songs of all time.
The actual Constitution Center was kind of unusual for us. One thing we've noted in Philadelphia is that we are pretty much the only non-Americans we've encountered, which is so different to New York City. As a result, and naturally enough, the exhibits at the Center were very much focused to US Citizens or residents, so a lot of the interaction stuff we couldn't really participate in. (It made me wonder how non-Australians would view our museums in Canberra.)
After lunch, we upped our nerd levels and met with an archaeologist from the Independence Hall Institute for a private tour of some of the artefacts they have found in the area. I think she was more fascinated by us, and how and why two Australian tourists were interested in all this stuff. We really loved the chat with her, we all ended up quite fascinated by the similarities between Pennsylvania and South Australia, especially with the influence of German settlers etc. I also never realised that ceramics were so interesting and such a good way of demonstrating stories about the people and era. It gave me so many ideas and inspiration to do my PhD (I'm too lazy to juggle writing one while working full time though :(.)
We ended up just dawdling around at the hotel for a while, before going back to the Steakhouse we went to Saturday night, because we really loved it. The Phillies are playing a play off here tonight, and I think everyone was out watching it, because we were the only ones in the restaurant for the whole time we were there! It was kind of cool. My god, the size of my meal though, it was redonkulous. I couldn't get close to finishing it.
We're now just back at the hotel, watching tv, and browsing things we can do tomorrow. One thing we will do, is my apparently required jean shopping at Macy's as I seem to break a pair every trip, and this was no exception, RIP Jeans zip.
Hope you have a great day (however much is left of it!)
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