boston back to new york

woke up to a glorious sunny morning in boston. stayed in bed in my nest of pillows for as long as possible then checked out of my lovely fancy hotel and decided to do the rest of the freedom trail as it was such a nice day. that was until i got to the scary bridge... beautiful blue sky, gorgeous blue water, bright shiny city, bridge made of metal mesh stuff - which you can see the gorgeous blue water through... so i totally bailed out - what a wimp! it really gives me the heeby-jeebies - i do not like to see water miles below rusty metal grating that i'm walking on... so, sorry but i didn't get to charlestown - i'm sure it's lovely though...

tried to go to a little printing museum where they printed the declaration of independence but annoyingly it closed at the end of october so i missed it by a day - grrrr! so i mooched about boston and came across a fabulous second hand bookshop called brattle book shop where i spent a happy hour or so. the shop has a vacant lot next to it and it was full of bookshelves filled with second hand books - bliss! i bought michael chabon's first book 'mysteries of pittsburgh' for a dollar and a book of grimms fairy tales illustrated by maurice sendak for 3 dollars - bargain!

went back to the hotel to pick up my bags and headed off to the bus - dreading it a bit but it was much better on the way back - phew! and we didn't get stuck in traffic so we got back on time. nice to see the power back on in downtown new york too! took the bus uptown back to the apartment and had a catch-up with sue, then off to bed...

today i did some laundry then went off to the new york historical society over on central park west where they have an exhibition of how world war two affected new york - phyllis has been included in this exhibition because of her radio show back in the 1940s which was a request show - phyllis would sing songs that were reqested by servicemen who would send letters to her, she was known as the 'canteen girl'. there were a couple of videos of her talking about her experiences on a video screen. i managed to record them both on my camera, but when i tried to record one of them again with the sound recording, a security guard came and told me off for recording, so i turned off my camera - but ha! i'd already recorded the videos - just without the sound...

then i headed downtown and finally, finally got a ticket for the imax screening of 'cloud atlas'. now, i think everyone knows how much i love love love the book and how worried i've been about the film and whether they're going to screw it up... well, the film is a bit different from the book but i LOVED it and i was very prepared to hate it! the film is a bit over-ambitious but it's a pretty ambitious project to start with! they don't pull everything off 100% but they've made an amazing film - great cast too - ben whishaw, jim broadbent and james d'arcy are particularly good.

can't believe my time here is nearly up... i'm gonna be home on thursday! eeek, i gotta fit in a lot more stuff to do...