Now I am going to talk about our journey there for the first time in this blog.
Actually I have been there a few times before, but it was the first time for my husband.
This time, our main purpose was to use the mileage of Virgin Atlantic which had stopped flying to Japan.
You have to be careful about airline mileage, don’t you, because it would disappear while you are unaware.
So I asked my husband where he wanted to visit among the places where we could go by mileage and he said, Boston.
The last time I went to Boston was 30 years ago, so I can say that it is almost the first time for me, too.
It just happened that a colleague of ours went to the city a couple of months before, and he introduced us to a guide who looked after him.
Because many Americans are huge, I was prepared mentally, but the person who came to meet us at the rendezvous was a small middle aged woman.
Her name was Fran.
She used to teach Latin in a high school and after retirement she became a guide.
She lives in a flat in a brick building outside of Boston.
She was nice and frank and friendly and fortunately for us, her American English was easy to understand.
Our sightseeing started at Massachusetts State House.
She gave us a huge amount of information about American history, which I was not familiar with, so I could not remember it all, but what I remember about this building is that this was designed by the same person who designed United States Capitol in Washington.
The golden dome on top was painted black during the war.
The Boston Common in front is the first public park in the US and was the site of the dwelling of the first European settler in Boston, a man named Blaxton.
After him, 400 Puritans came to live not far from here, but many of them died because they used dirty water.
So Blaxton invited them to his area where there was a pure fountain.
The Puritans started living around the Boston Common area, too, but after a while, the relationship between them and Blaxton deteriorated and in the end he had to move away from Boston.
It is a story of the early 17th century.
