The Star Spangled Banner & Fireworks

Okay, so, as I touched on in my Toronto entry; I’d decided originally that I wanted to be in Boston for at least an extra night. I sort of like to have 2 days to explore in bigger cities; and in Boston my thoughts were that I’d also need a day for Cambridge and a day trip to Providence. In total I was in Boston for five nights – 3 in the first lot, 2 in the second; but because of the 4th of July being thrown in and also because of allowing for arriving later in the day/checking out/etc – I really didn’t get a full five days in total. Providence was cut, which is okay. I suspect that if I come back to the US at any point for ‘travelling’ purposes (as opposed to vacationing) then I’d spend a lot more time in the New England area anyway.


I arrived back around 3pm on the 3rd of July; by the time I got to the hostel from the airport it was probably 4:30. It’s really refreshing coming back to a city that you’ve already been to. When I was in Europe I was able to do it a couple of times – I came back to Budapest after going to Romania and although I stayed in a different area I just felt more at ease. In London I came back to the same hostel, and then I came back to London a third time but to a different hostel. It feels great when you’re getting to that point where you don’t need to like, be quadruple checking the subway map to make sure you’re going in the right direction. The hostel in Boston had been okay, not great, but not horrible enough to make me cancel my second reservation. On the bright side I was put on a first floor room (again, like Toronto, yay for the suitcase) and the room was cooler (with both a fan and working AC) but the bed was like, a joke. I was on the top bunk – which I’ve resigned myself to a lot of the time, it happens, it’s not the end of the world. But this bed was like.... okay the original railing had come off and so they had this weird plstic railing on. The ladder wasn’t on the side, it was on the end, and it involved like having to hike your leg over the bed end and meanwhile your head is precariously close to the fan. Overall it was a death trap – and this isn’t mentioning that because of the wall sort of being weird in the room, half of my bed was against the wall but the other half had like, two feet between me and the wall – meaning that if I had a restless night I could soooo fall off the damn thing. Awesome.


Unfortunately it was laundry time again (I do it about every 5 days it seems) so I had to allow time to do that. More important than laundry however was sourcing some red beads – for Canada Day, I realise I never mentioned, that I bought a shirt at Niagara Falls that was red with a moose and it says ‘Canada, eh?’ so I wore that. For July 4th I have a blue top with white polka dots and I thought if I wore it with like, long red beads it could be cute. So I went out to the downtown crossing area where I hadn’t been yet but I knew there were quite a few stores and I found this jewellery store which for me, as a jewellery freak... oh my God. If I wasn’t on a bit of a budget both with cash and room in my suitcase... I would’ve gone beserk. Then I spent a bit of time out wandering along Boylston Street which is this long street which my hostel I think is probably in the middle of, but I got the subway a stop away from my usual stop and walked along, which included a trip to the Prudential Center which is meant to be some really great shopping venue but it didn’t seem that brilliant to me. I had Panda Express for dinner; then went back to do laundry.


When you’re on a top bunk the best thing is when there’s a bank of lockers next to you, it means that you can like, put your few essential things (for me – phone, the key to the room, a book, my glasses, a water bottle) up on there within reach. It’s hard to describe but basically there was a locker separating me and the person in the next top bunk. She had put her second pillow on there, I sort of tucked my glasses and book and key underneath the pillow and went to sleep. I woke up at 3am needing to pee. I reached out to grab my glasses and the key. Nothing was there. The pillow was gone. A bunch of her stuff was on the other side. None of my stuff.


There are hostel horror stories about things being stolen and all sorts and I was just like... in that moment I didn’t know what to think. The phone I have bought is a piece of crap, Charlie St. Cloud is of high value to me but not something you’d really steal over, and seriously, who wants my glasses? I didn’t want to wake people up or whatever but a part of me was just freaking out. When you’re travelling and especially when you’re travelling alone, your possessions become really important. I don’t like people touching my things without permission. It’s an invasion of privacy and it’s coming into my little bubble of space and on so many levels it bothers me. I said out loud, loudly, “where the fuck is all my stuff?” (excuse my French) and being 3am they were all asleep and no one responded. I had my iTouch and I was attempting to shine the light around to see something but it was dim and I didn’t have my glasses. Meanwhile, the whole reason I was awake was because I needed to pee. A part of me thought ‘just sort it in the morning’ but if it was a theft issue it needed to be dealt with immediately. Anyway so I got off the bunk, turned on my little night light, cringing because I didn’t want to wake people up, even if one of them was a potential thief. I immediately spotted my phone – it was on the floor next to the girl beneath me. Odd. I then looked behind the locker. There were my glasses. Finally I spotted my key and Charlie (the key in Charlie as a bookmark; it was like a card key) like, right up against the wall behind my bunk sort of under the bed of the girl next to me. The only logical explanation for any of this is that the dumbass in the top bunk pulled her pillow off, sent my stuff flying, and didn’t bother to pick it up. Maybe she didn’t realise; but seriously, how do you not hear or notice a phone and a book falling off a locker which is taller than a top bunk? Seriously?


Fortunately for her I didn’t see her again. If I had, I would’ve told her to show some respect and held back from strangling her. I was seriously, seriously mad. I really... I mean in hindsight it’s whatever but in the moment I was FUMING mad. It’s so disrespectful. I would like to give her the benefit of the doubt and think she didn’t notice but I cannot comprehend how much of a dumbass you must be to not notice something like that.


So my July 4th was off to a spectacular start, me in a foul mood, ranting and raving online about the incident like a lunatic. To add to it, when I’d checked in the day before I’d enquired about whether there was anything being hosted by the hostel and they said no, which was disappointing. I know that they’re ‘family friendly’ but I would’ve thought they’d at least have said like ‘anyone who wants to go to the fireworks meet at X time’ or something. Anyway I decided I’d go for a wander about town looking for festivities and then come back to the hostel later in the day to suss out whether there might be anyone else at a loose end to hang out with. I knew of a few events and things that were going on, the main was the Charles River fireworks which are renowned, and so my must see thing was these fireworks.


There was a lot of activity going on in the main part of town without there actually seeming like there was much happening to create so many people milling around. By city hall was the ‘information desk’ for the ‘Boston Harbourfest’ sort of like this week of July 4th related ‘events’ all over the city; some of which you had to pay for – i.e. you could pay to participate in a re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party. Anyway around this information desk was a bunch of... okay, so, there were about 239580 people handing out free Minute Maid (a juice) and the boy scouts had a climbing wall and a flag raising ceremony and a kid recited the erm, thingy... um... oh crap. Pledge of Allegiance? Is that what it’s called? And that was kinda it, there were some product stands, like, go up and play with a Blackberry whatever the latest edition was... it was weird. Anyway near this area was Quincy Market, again, HEAPS of people around; I saw some orchestra perform who are supposedly famous (okay I heard them, I was so far back in the crowd that I could hardly see them) and street performers but nothing officially historical really going on. I wound up getting the subway out to some random stops because, that’s what I do. I went to Newton Centre (hi Craig :)) and to Riverside which was a HUGE mistake because evidently Riverside is the main park and ride for the Red Sox game that was on and I got there and my eyes boggled at the sheer volume of people who were just lining up to get a TICKET for the train, let alone the people who were waiting on the platform. So honestly my day time was pretty uneventful.


As planned I headed back to the hostel late afternoon and I overheard the guy who I think is the manager of the hostel telling some other people something about ‘meeting at 6pm.’ I was like :/ okayyy yesterday you had nothing planned. I figured I’d go with it and I discovered at 6pm that they were hosting a cookout/barbeque/whatever word you want to use – I call it a street party because literally we were out on the street around the corner from the hostel main entrance. Reason for this – they had ‘jungle juice’ and the hostel isn’t actually licensed to have alcohol on premises of any description – to sell, for us to have it, anything – and so if the police turned up or whatever, it wasn’t anything to do with the hostel, it was just a bunch of random people who decided to have burgers and hotdogs and jungle juice on the street. IT WAS FREE which was the important thing. The police DID turn up – they were just patrolling the streets I think – and the issue was that there was alcohol in public – a lot of the guys had gone and bought beer too. By now the jungle juice was gone. And as soon as the police were out of sight the hostel manager says loudly ‘okay, if you have beer, IT NEEDS TO BE IN PAPER BAG IF THEY COME BACK AGAIN.’


To my annoyance, the guys who I sort of ‘befriended’ decided to go off to a bar and I wasn’t too keen on the idea because the hostel apparently had scored some ‘excellent rooftop view’ for the fireworks. Long story short; turns out that the manager is friends with a guy who lives around the corner and he was pretty much inviting whoever to come up to his apartment building rooftop. I’m sure that you could’ve seen the fireworks from there – I went with the crowd, went up to this rooftop not really knowing any of the people who were still around – and I’d been up there for about five minutes when someone decided to let off their own fireworks. They went zooming around in every which direction in a not so safe fashion and thus far that day I’d been burnt by a cigarette, tripped over in front of everyone at this party, nearly been knocked over by a crazy cyclist and had my scare of my stuff being stolen and this near death by fireworks was just too much for me and I decided to high tail it toward the Charles River.


Me and everyone else in the city.


I cannot explain how many people there were. I didn’t need to know how to get to the Charles River – as soon as I was heading in the direction I was joining this mass of people moving in that direction. You got to the bridge that goes from the Boston side to the Cambridge side by MIT and it came to a stand still. The police had shut off the bridge, no one else could get on. Since it was just me on my own it was easier to sort of try to get through all the people to try and get a decent location. I just kept going along the river on the Boston side. The problem is that there are lots of trees lining the river. If there were no trees, you could be anywhere and have a brilliant view; but the trees mean that you kind of need to find a clearing among it all. I was really, really happy with my final location, I darted around a little and wound up getting a pretty decent view, albeit partially obstructed by tree, but I was so close to the place where they were being let off that I could FEEL the fireworks, if that makes sense.


I had a little drama getting back to the hostel, I just sorta went with the crowd but wound up coming off the river further past the hostel than I’d even been and so I didn’t recognise anything. Thank God the people behind me were normal and nice and not scary and they saw me craning my neck to read a street sign and looking at my map and they gave me directions voluntarily without me even having to ask :)


July 5th was a bank holiday since July 4th fell on a Sunday and it was also the day that I was due to check out and leave Boston. My bus wasn’t til a bit later in the afternoon though so I decided to put my suitcase in a locker and have another few hours of time to check out some things. I went to Cambridge Central (the subway station between MIT and Harvard) and briefly to South Boston (I wanted to do this purely because in Good Will Hunting he lives there <3) and spent some more time in the Back Bay and the immediate area around my hostel which is actually a cute funky area, the Berklee College of Music is right there so it has a hip, young, muso vibe. And I got some fruit from Whole Foods for the bus ride. I’m glad that I got to see the fireworks – they are a big deal, like the biggest July 4th fireworks in the nation I’ve been told – and even though I really didn’t experience much at all in my Boston 2.0 other than a day where I just having little things go wrong and by the end I just wanted to curl in a ball and cry... it was still a good experience, one of those life things that I can say that I spent July 4th 2010 watching the fireworks at the Charles River in Boston. Pretty freaking cool :)

Although in Canada I got my pin and a flag so I think Canada Day wins ;)