Woke like a tree full of bees

Boston


So on the second day in Boston we discovered somehow (probably through overuse of http://www.nytimes.com but i forget how exactly) that Barack Obama was to be attending a charity event on the street next to our big crazyperson hostel.

Amy and I dedicated ourselves to the cause of waiting in the freezing rain to see him arrive, whilst Emily had gone more than an hour and a half without sugar and could therefore not be present after having a Haribo-related meltdown about ten minutes in.

We were delirious from the past few days' traveling and bored stiff by the end, but here are a few pictures of the anticipation:

We didn't get to see him. He was ushered into the building through that irritating white tent. We did however get to speak to some very interesting Bostonian journalists, even got interviewed by one (we naturally proceeded to convince them that we had flown over from the UK specially for the occasion), witnessed the erratic behaviour of some of the locals who were so out of their minds trying to throw themselves at the security they were actually, now i think about it, probably straight from our hostel, and worked up an appetite for pizza and shopping afterwards. No sales tax in Boston you say? Excellent.

Listening to: "Sodom South Georgia" by Iron and Wine.

Listen here.

Alligator Tears

And so had ended our crazy Canadian adventure. We three girls were now off to city-hop the East Coast on our own, which meant back to staying in hostels instead of the lovely hotels that "TOURS4FUN" had provided for us.

We arrived in Boston and took the T train to a beautifully leafy street in the Back Bay to find our hostel. It was in a gorgeous area that you could walk to from just about everywhere, but looked mainly residential and quite homely despite being so close to central Boston. We dragged our suitcases through the drizzle, cheerfully practicing our Matt Damon and Ben Affleck Bostonian drawls until we got to 40 Berkely Street. It was a beautiful old building with amazing huge living spaces and sofas and ceiling-to-floor windows letting in the occasional mighty rays of sunshine in between spells of rainfall. So lovely, and so much more than we had dared to expect.

Until, that is, the night began to fall. Gradually, then, as if some sort of bizarre dog whistle too high for regular hearing had been blown, groups of very strange people began to emerge. We began to have our hunches that this was not your normal hostel. Granted, there were a few groups of travelers our age -which by the way was refreshing after the strictly middle-aged tourbus we had lived on for the previous week - and we did encounter the token groups of Australians cracking open some cans before 5pm each day. But this particular establishment seemed to be full of not-quite-with-it elderly occupants: some not even that elderly, but definitely all the more not-quite-with-it. The first we met when after very ignorantly closing our bedroom door with mild force, she took it upon herself to hobble over with her crooked cane, hair in curlers, back arched, to tell us off, stating that "people are sleeping, don't you know it's past seven-thirty at night?" Others we came across wandering the halls, riding the lifts - 7th floor, 3rd floor, 5th floor, 3rd floor, 6th floor, 3rd floor... and so on. All the while wearing vacant expressions and resilient young people on their arms who seemed to be trying their best to guide them to their rooms with calm words and steady steps.

We decided collectively that night, tucked up in our sweet 3-person bedroom overlooking the picturesque little green garden below, that either we had wandered into the urban east-coast Twilight Zone, or this so-called 'hostel' was doubling up as a halfway house.

Listening to: "Alligator" - Tegan and Sara, Four Tet remix.

Have a listen here.


Read my article about travel in this month's issue of Novel Magazine here.