swingchickie | boston weekend recap

no more 48-hour boston weekends... that was insane. fun, but insane, and i'm still tired. :) where do we start...

got in late afternoon, and after a quick nap we headed out for dinner. we were planning to find someplace on newbury street, but we took 2 steps out of the hotel and it started to pour... so we went back in and ate at turner fisheries. (good, but i don't get all the hype.) the rain had stopped by the time dinner was done, so we took a stroll up newbury and then walked over to finale for molten chocolate cake and coffee. passed out by midnight.

saturday was packed with touristy stuff, jack and i had a list of things to hit in just one day. after breakfast at the trident, we cabbed it to the aquarium to geek out on the fish (he was a marine biology major)... even at 10am, it was packed solid with families, which meant hundreds of screaming children and getting bumped with a stroller every few minutes and entire 10-person families spreading out across a tank to look together so you couldn't see. *sigh*. we did get up close to see a few things though:

jellyfish!

frog with a funny-looking face!

and... penguin sex!

(yes, those penguins were really having an intimate moment. at first when i saw them across the exhibit, they were walking around together in a way that looked like they were dancing... i went to get jack's attention because it was so cute, and when we looked back they were horizontal and going to town. o-kay.)

this penguin, though, was my favorite. every once in a while these little sprinklers pop out of the fake rocks to wash away the penguin poo and stuff... some of the penguins were playing around in the spray... but this little guy just stood there and let the stream of water hit him in the face. for like 20 minutes. he'd shift his weight a little bit, but wouldn't budge from his spot... he just looooved that water.

after the aquarium, we headed through downtown crossing and stopped at... shoot... the old meeting house? (bostonians: what's the old freedom trail church that's right next to the big old gov't building that's now a ruth's chris steakhouse?) anyway, that's where we stopped to walk through the graveyard and take photos of some of the headstones. it's amazing how much graves have changed in 300 or so years -- i'd never noticed before that many of them had imagery of skulls and the grim reaper. that would be so horrific today, but back then it was the thing.

i liked the saying at the bottom of this one: "the sweet rememberance of the just/shall flourish when they sleep in dust".

we had a quick late lunch in beacon hill, and then back to the hotel to nap and shower for dinner. we ended up getting to davis square a bit late because the red line wasn't running (WTF?) and the shuttle buses were mobbed so we hailed a cab... we met up with J, put our names in at diva, and headed next door to the diva lounge to have a drink and apps while we waited. the lounge was under construction when i moved, so it was my first time there... pretty neat! although i have to say the velvet rope and bouncer later in the evening kind of cracked me up... davis square has a velvet-rope bar now?

after dinner we met up with L at johnny d's to catch the love dogs. ran into some very old friends there, B and T who stopped going dancing a long time ago... the band was awesome as always and it was great to share them (and johnny d's) with jack.

getting ready for brunch sunday morning, i turned on the news to check the weather... the "late in the day" rain i had heard about had been changed to "OMG possible hail and strong winds mid-day!!!!" crap. jack and i decided to play it safe and head home right after brunch, rather than stay in the city until the storm started and risk having a long unsafe drive home. not having anyone's e-mails with me, and failing at my attempts to remember them (sorry,

katehaney and

occhi_cinesi!), i crossed my fingers that the rain would start early enough that copley would be automatically cancelled. about 30 minutes after we got on the pike to go home, the heavens opened, and it was that way on and off for the entire drive home... so good move that we got on the road when we did, but bummer that we had to miss some loved ones. :(

next boston visit will be in the fall sometime... we definitely need more than 2 days.