My Boston Break

Dear T&P readers, I apologize for the long silence. I was in Boston, visiting Lovely Daughter #2. I stayed in the sweet little flat she shares with her two housemates. (Apparently, every college student's pad must have Tibetan prayer flags and twinkle lights. I think it's written in The Constitution, somewhere.):

I gotta say, Boston in the fall is bee-yoo-ti-ful!

LD#2 was eager to show me around her new, adopted city. We walked past many historical sites along the Freedom Trail...

We were deeply moved by the city's Holocaust Memorial...

We restored ourselves with pastries and a pot of tea at Tealuxe (I've been ordering their teas online for years, so it was a thrill to see the real place):

We trolled around North End, the Italian section of the city, and bought some wonderful, crusty bread:

We walked through Harvard's campus several times:

The city has so many lovely old homes! Some are in need of TLC, and I fantasized adopting them all and fixing them up:

Some have been lovingly preserved or restored...

We visited the open-air Haymarket, where fruits and veggies, fish, cheese, and meats are on sale for unbelievably low prices. LD#2 says she never spends more than $10 there, and she gets enough produce for a week's worth of home-cooked meals:

We bought sandwiches and ogled all the yummy things for sale at Savenor's, a fantastic food emporium. Julia Child used to live very near by; she drew her signature and a cheery "Bon Appetit!" in the wet cement just outside the shop's front door years ago:

We toured the glass exhibit at Harvard's Museum of Natural History. I've wanted to see this amazing collection of hand-blown botanical models ever since I first read about them a decade ago. They are positively stunning. Every single thing is glass, rendered in exquisite detail:

Imagine, those tiny tendrils on the Sweet Peas are glass!:

In the same museum is a breathtaking array of big bones from giant, extinct creatures, like a mastodon and a a kronosaurus. The thing that blew us away, though, was this giant sloth. Yowza!:

Fall is clearly in the air in Boston, which was a nice break from the hot, dry days of Los Angeles.

We tucked in to many a good, inexpensive meal (after all, LD#2 is a grad student, with a grad student's budget). This was a curried pumpkin soup and a caramelized onion/gorgonzola savory pastry from The Biscuit:

More fall colors!:

And I had a Bucket List experience on campus at Harvard.

More about that next time!....