Unlike on our European holidays, we are now swapping our tourist visits to churches and cathedrals for visits here to universities, museums and libraries - the true humanist cathedrals of free thought in the Land of the Free.
Boston has great ones of course: Harvard, MIT & Tufts; the wonderful Museum of Fine Arts, where we spent most of yesterday out of the rain (including a room full of top Monets all donated by rich benfactors); and the splendid Boston City Library today, with murals by Puvis de Chavannes and the inspiring motto outside: “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty”.
At the more mundane level I am truly sick of seeing Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks everywhere! We really have to search hard to find somewhere that has coffee that is properly made and served in a china cup. Geoff refuses to eat and drink out of cardboard and plastic, so this is a bit of a challenge in this take-out culture, but of course there is the best and worst of everything here. (We are enjoying some lovely organic Champlain Triple cheese from Middlebury Vermont and Californian red wine as I write).
We took a harbour cruise this morning and learnt that 75% of downtown Boston is built on reclaimed land, this is the second largest Irish City in the world after Dublin, they were the first city in America to have an underground rail system, and their new sewerage reprocessing plant, designed to clean up the harbour water, cost $3.8 billion!