Two marathons long

The second to last day of this trip. First thing on our agenda today was visit one of the most well-known universities -- Harvard, or actually it is Hahvahd, according to what we learned from the tour. Now I know that the Bostonian accent takes out every word that has a “r” and replaces it with a “h.” I enjoyed walking around the campus. The architectures seem classical, and their images left a mark in my mind. Through the campus tour, we learned more about the history behind Harvard and also the size of its campus library. From what I recall, I believe that the length of the whole library takes about two marathons to walk through the whole entire area (or something like that). We went to visit the bookstore after the tour before we continue our agenda of the day. Next stop was to the Black Heritage Trail, the place where we have made several attempts in the previous days but never actually got to it. Now today's the last chance, or well, one of the two last chances. We arrived at the trail and did a self-guided tour, with two people from our group trying their best to improvise and give us a tour through the trail on the spot (good job guys by the way). First thing I noticed in this area, it is a very quiet neighborhood, as we haven't encountered much people throughout the trail. Its houses and buildings are also very pretty as this also may mean that they are certainly not cheap housing. Through walking this trail, it gave me quite a bit feeling of home (and by that I meant the city San Francisco). The hills in this area weren't actually that intense, and definitely not as intense as the ones in SF. However, after about eight days of continuous walking, long-term exposure to the heat, lack of sleep, and also with the clock ticking in past lunch time when we needed food, it took us quite some time to not just walk the hills actually but we were somewhat dragging along the whole trail. Another feature that reminded me of SF was the alleys that we passed through. We have come to encounter a few alleys along our way, and also the feel that even the streets were alleys, mainly due to the fact that there weren't cars passing through. Much of the information from this tour can be related back to what I have learned from history class, including topics such as slavery and racial segregation. We ended our tour after the last stop at a chapel, where we learned more about racism back then in this place.
Now as we were starving for food, we made our way back to Chinatown to get Pho for lunch. Perhaps this was the latest lunch we ever had -- 3 something P.M. In this case, I would actually call it an afternoon tea instead of lunch. After “lunch,” we headed to the Freedom Trail for a tour. We had a very huge group for this tour and overall I thought that the tour guide did a wonderful job in not just crowd control but also in the way she delivered the information. She had a costume as a female who lived in the suburb areas in the 1700s. Throughout this tour, I've retrieved some of my memory of what I learned in history classes again, although I believe those who took AP United States history were more excited during this tour. Some of the historical events that came back to my mind from this tour were the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, as well as some of significant figures in history during this time period. We have also learned where some events took place on the street, and what I remember the most from this tour was the clapping and singing we did together at one of the corners of the street, when the tour guide wanted us to feel on the site the protest that took place back then. Overall, it was a nice experience as the tour guide led us through the historical time periods walking through the Freedom Trail. I would say that this tour definitely kept me awake and attentive throughout the whole two hours, as the tour guide used a tone that was engaging and interactive. For sure this is one of the tours that I recommend if you were to ever visit Boston.
Our next stop was the Quincy Market, which was right next to where we ended our tour. We went to check out the street performance, and it was entertaining and interesting to watch. Then we walked about the food market indoors with huge waves of people. This market seems to be a tourist attraction as I see many tourist groups traveling about. After some exploration, I decided to try one of the lobster rolls. Although we ate lunch today at around 3 in the afternoon, most of us still managed to finish our dinner at the place before heading on for dessert.
The last stop for today -- Mike’s Pastry for cannoli. We walked into Little Italy and saw that this is quite a small neighborhood with many cars stuck in traffic. We found the pastry place and already from one street away we can see the line of people waiting at the storefront to get in. We realized that it actually didn’t took too long while we were lining up. As we made our way into the store, I was somewhat shocked that there was not any lineup system, which made the store seem quite chaotic (basically imagine a very huge wave of people just flooding all over the store). We made our way to the front to buy our cannoli, and then pushed our way through out the door. We exited the pastry place and found a park nearby where we enjoyed our dessert while sitting on the steps near the small waterfront view. On our way back to the metro station to go back to our hotel, we walked along the Boston Harbor and enjoyed the Boston city in a beautiful night view!
-Shirley Tsang