Road Tripping: Boston

Unlike Maryland from Ithaca, Boston actually is a day trip from where I live. A few weeks ago, I rode in with my parents and some of their friends to see a little of the city. If you've never driven in Boston, you’re missing out. You may be thinking, “I've driven in New York City, and that’s so much bigger.” Well, in New York City, you can actually drive both ways on a majority of streets. There’s also really no such thing as a seven way junction, in which your turning options are right, sort of right, really right, straight, kind of left, and do not enter. And then there’s rush hour, which is was a breeze back in 1657 when three horses reached an intersection at the same time.

Fortunately, I wasn't driving. We started the day at the Public Garden and the Boston Common, then followed the Freedom Trail over to the Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

View of the Boston skyline from the Common

On our way back to where we had parked, we stopped by the Shaw Memorial opposite from the State House. We had studied this memorial in my writing seminar during spring semester. Given the opportunity to see it in real life, we went a little out of our way to hunt it down. The location is kind of weird in my opinion, because instead of facing the Common, it faces the road, which makes it hard to get a good look at it since if you step too far back, you’re fighting with pedestrians for the sidewalk, and if you step further back than that, you’re in the road.

Still, it was interesting to get to see it for myself. Some things I noticed: The angels near the top of the memorial weren't that prominent (either that or I was being blinded by the sun), Shaw was definitely at the forefront of the scene, and it was more 3D than I expected. We read about how the sculptor went back and forth about how he was going to design the memorial before deciding on a high relief, which it turns out means almost 3D or something like that. I know, I've got the terminology down solid. I should be an art major.

Shaw Memorial

There’s also a back to the memorial that I hadn't known about until I saw it for myself. It basically memorializes the officers who took on leadership of the regiment and the soldiers who fought. It also mentions how they went for a year and a half without pay because they were going to get less than white soldiers, so I guess the movie Glory at least got some things right. And so concluded my real life history and English lesson (and this blog post).