Philadelphia, part two
Until last weekend, Philadelphia was the only major city on the Eastern seaboard I'd never spent any time in. It's one of those places that's easy to go around on the way to somewhere else, and has, like most worthwhile places, suffered from a bad reputation... you'd think Independence Mall was surrounded by miles and miles of ghetto or something. For that reason alone, I knew I would go there eventually. I share Paul Theroux's disdain of people who take well-organized vacations and hold strong opinions on places they've never been.

Philadelphia is an interesting city, with lots of hidden gems. I wish I'd had more time to discover them, and that I hadn't pulled my Rocky stunt before embarking on a walking tour (My hamstrings are still knotted from Sunday's abuses). It's easy to get around Center City on foot. For one thing, it was refreshing to be in a city built on a grid, with a sensible numbering system, and streets that take you places without changing names every other block. And every city should copy Philly's street signs; they tell you exactly where you are, and when you've hit an arterial. That's handy info.

There is a WalkPhiladelphia program, with lots of signage for do-it-yourselfers and many scheduled guided tours. One of the tours scheduled for last Sunday was for "Architecture Old And New," which would have been interesting to me, but again, especially since I blew out my legs first thing, I'd done enough walking. So, I opted for the motor trolley tour. With a stop located at the back entrance of the Art Museum, I was able to stagger around the building (though I like art, and I'm sure the collections inside are astounding, I wanted more of a "slice of life" than I'd be bound to find in a museum, and I only had the one day), take a seat, and leave the driving to them.

I recommend the trolley tour, though you need to be a bit iron-assed to be able to survive their thinly cushioned wooden benches as they navigate cobbled streets. They recirculate on a fixed route that follows a regular schedule; you can hop on and off at your leisure. And they're narrated, so you can discover that Ben Franklin laid every cobble and cornerstone of the city himself, just in case you didn't pick that up in middle school history class.

The first leg of that tour took me right back to the hotel I'd just walked from. Hardee har har har. The ride was crowded with hyperactive kids, and you'd think they'd want to leap off for the Please Touch Museum, but they were led by fussy adults who wanted to see the Liberty Bell. I wanted to go to the Please Touch Museum.

Actually, it was a shame I wasn't in a museum mood, because there are many in Philly. Everything's under glass there, including, apparently, a giant distended colon. Amy and her group had already done that tour on Saturday before I'd arrived. I was sufficiently regaled with tales of carbuncles and pustules and buboes, Victorian surgical instruments and (ahem) exam tools, and the amazing story of how "only one man died" during the Lewis & Clark Expedition (how many natives they might have killed with their European diseases doesn't seem to be chronicled).

No museums. Street life. I repeated it as my silent mantra as we bounced by the Rodin Museum", the Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences... see the trend?

Where did I finally get my cheesesteak (because you just know I did)? And what street hustle did I fall for? The answers to those questions will be revealed in our next exhausting, er, exciting, episode.

Told you I was going to string this out. 12:02:52 PM    comment []trackback []