President's Day Weekend 2008

Brent and I packed our bags, hopped on the greyhound bus, and headed to Boston, Massachusetts for President's Day weekend. We met up with some good friends, the Rand family, whom we met while going to school in Iowa City. The Rands now live in Maine, so each family met half way. It was so good to see them.

We received plenty of advice as to what we should do and see while in Boston, thanks to my cousin Katie. She and her husband lived there for a few months and loved it. Unfortunately, the weather was temperamental, so we didn't get to see all that we wanted. However, the sights we did see were great!

Boston has some beautifully old buildings.
I wonder what Boston was like as a young city.

We walked a part of the Freedom Trail. There, we reverently strolled through the graveyard where dozens of famous freedom fighters were buried. We viewed the grave site of Paul Revere, Robert Treat Paine, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin's parents, Mother Goose, and a Nicholas Gardner (maybe we're related?). It was a very special place.

While at the grave yard, Brent and I learned of much symbolism that was used during the young days of America. Almost every tombstone had an engraving of either a hourglass donning wings, a skull and bones, a grim reaper, or a cherub. The hourglass with wings symbolized that "time flies", the skull and bones and the reaper are pretty self explanatory, and the cherub represented spirituality and guardians about the tomb. We read that pictures were commonly depicted because they were easier and cheaper to create than words. That's also why a lot of tombstones are missing vowels in the words.

We visited Boston's Chinatown. We came on a really good day because that day, each store was being blessed by dragons. The dragons would dance around in front of the store/restaurant, and then stop right in front of the door. The store would have an offering of either cabbage or oranges for the dragons, and then the store would be blessed with prosperity for the next year.

We dined at a Vietnamese restaurant. It was so good! The restaurant was blessed while we were eating, and it was neat to view the ritual from the inside.

We also visited the MIT museum, and the Harvard museum of Natural History. If you ever visit Boston, you should check them out. We also walked through Harvard a couple of times and dreamed about our children attending.