An Improper Bostonian?

There's something about wandering for 10 days around the Greater Boston that I loved and it was having the opportunity to know the city by walking around town without needing a map or anything like that and knowing my cellphone was in my pocket just in the event I had an emergency or got seriously lost -of course, the latter thing never happened because I was not in the streets of a burmese town in the mountains, but in the seconld largest city in the Eastern Coast of the US. The other thing never happened, B"H

Lissette had prepared a very detailed schedule of activities, which started taking a stroll down the Back Bay, starting at Boston Common, a place that used to be an area for cow feeding and herding in the 17th century, if I remember well. Now it is a park. Then we walked all down the Back Bay many areas in Boston are built on reclaimed land, like this one. The weather and the architecture helped make me get an impression that I was walking down the streets of a british city -where is that bloody Camilla?-

Having plenty of time to walk around town before and after attending ALL the attractions that Lissette included in the schedule and my curiosity (I'm an Aquarius, c'mon!) made me know a lot more than any regular tourist would. For instace, after visiting an attraction, like the New England Aquarium, infested with kids from summer camps, I decided to take a stroll down the area, after stopping at a CVS Pharmacy to buy a bottle of Dasani mineral water (it's mineral water, slightly sweetened with Splenda and a light touch of natural lemon, grape, raspberry or strawberry flavor, and it is just PERFECT) and then making moja štikla do the rest, taking me to the Financial District, to the Old State House, to Beacon Hill, to discover my namesake espalanade and finally reaching one of my favorite spots in Boston, The Shops at Prudential Center. That way I got to know lots of parts of the city in such a way that Lissette and Matt were surprised since they never expected me getting to know the city in such level of detail (well, maybe she did)

But what neither of them ever expected me to LOVE about Boston, apart from the metro, or what they call "The T" (I miss you Charlie, especially the Green Line), with its metrotrams that feel SO European for just a few seconds, you feel like you are in Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds or even Dublin until the machine announces the next station in standard american, not hard-to-understand bostonian english which sounds like british english sometimes. But, the other thing I LOVED about Boston was the cows. They are scattered around the city, and you can find them at virtually every corner, and of course, since I have always wanted to touch a cow's nose to see if it's cold like those of cats and dogs, I took pics of every cow I saw during my stay in Boston. And believe me, there are MANY of them, even a cow like a piggy bank and another like Maya the Bee, with its bee-wings and antennas :-D

On a side note, I also liked the people in Boston a lot. VERY nice and friendly, and good-looking also! It's a culturally very diverse city where you can find people from Guatemala who speaks better Mayan than Spanish, a Brazilian Muscle Mary, an irish-american with a green t-shirt, an italian-american that looks more Sicilian than anything else, a Lithuanian jew and a Cape Verdean and three WASPs (one VERY fat) in the same elevator, oh, and I forgot to mention one ECA Alumni! SH*T, I saw quite a few of them down the streets! All those things -feeling like at home with my family, the people in the streets, the city itself .. have made me think quite a few times if I should think of hopping to the Boston Area as a next step in my life...maybe I become a Bostonian in the future!