Boston - Tea anyone?

Boston Buildings
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In Boston, we had booked a small studio apartment just off trendy Newbury Street, a great option, recommended if you fancy a bit more of a homely feel while paying less than a hotel. Our place was a hop and a skip from the subway, restaurants and shops and had a great view across the street. Inside, Monts was impressed with the exposed brick walls in the well-equiped kitchen, although Phill was slightly less impressed with the bathroom which wasn't of the cat swinging variety, meaning he would invariably hit his head, knee or elbow on something while trying to get in and out of the shower.

Famous Dead Patriots
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Boston had, in our view, two great attributes for a US city. Firstly, it's nice and compact which meant we pretty quickly got to grips with what was where. Also, it has a logical subway system, with funny old tram-like trains on the older lines. Getting from the airport to our place was a piece of cake, even if we did have to lug our bags up lots of stairs, again.

Day one involved the usual necessities like laundry, haircuts and doing some research on whether we could get tickets to watch the Red Sox just down the road at Fenway Park - unfortunately they were playing down in Florida at the time, so we bought a T-shirt for Phill and got brownie points with the locals down the pub.

Shiny Building
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We also had a challenge to find somewhere to get Phill's watch fixed, as it had lost one of the screws keeping the strap on. Visiting several jewellers we were met with shakes of the head - it was too specialist and only sending it back to the maker would work. Eventually, one jeweller suggested a watch repair shop in a big old building - a maze of small businesses all doing weird and specialist things. Watch repair couldn't help but said we could try Abraham's place two floors up. Abe turned out to be a charming long haired, tatooed middle aged man, who wouldn't be out of place in a Hell's Angel's bar but instead ran a bizarre shop full of all sorts of strange knick-naks with a tiny yappy dog. He spent half an hour going through every box of screws to find something that might fit while managing to serve lots of other customers coming in for batteries, silver wire and other oddities and tell us some amusing anecdote about each one after they left. Eventually he found the right screw, spent another 10 minutes fitting the fiddly little bugger and then refused to charge us anything. Ok, so you might wonder why we spent two paragraphs telling you that, but after dealing with lots of surly and unhelpful people in the big cities, this was a breath of fresh air and we would recommend that everyone goes to his shop - A Cohen & Co, 333 Washington Street, Boston.

Lazing in the Park
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Boston, as most of you will know, is where the famous tea party that kicked off the US war for indepenence happened and the town is full of historic landmarks, and much of Boston's charm lies in the mix of old landmarks which seem to sit quite comfortably alongside the shiny new highrises housing banks and businesses. A walk called the "Freedom Trail" is marked through the city and we duly followed it, from Boston Common where they used to graze cattle, through the historic graveyard where Sam Adams and the victims of the Boston Massacre are buried to Paul Revere's house in Little Italy, but became slightly depressed as we kept reading about all the nasty things us English had done to those poor ex-british tax dodgers, er sorry, Americans. Ending up in Little Italy we took a coffee and cake break, which made us feel a lot better.

In the evening we were spoilt for choice. A visit to the historic Union Oyster Bar was, we understood, compulsory, so we went there and so did everyone else. The food was good enough but nothing to match a tiny restarant in Little Italy called Carmen, where you can watch the cooks preparing your large helping of pork chops or fish stew as you walk through the kitchen to get to the loos. They don't have a dessert menu as no one ever has space and there are lots of nice Italian cake and ice cream shops round the corner. We also tried the fried clams at the outwardly unprepossessing, but excellent Summer Shack near our apartment, which went down well but added a bit more to our increasingly fat bellies. Unfortunately our plans to check out the oldest pub in town where Sam Adams and his mates used to plot against us nasty English were thwarted by Monts forgetting to carry ID with her and the doorman's inability to trust his judgement that she is rather older than 21.