Salem - It's a bit like Whitby

Day 7 - August 3rd

This morning we drove from Boston to Salem, about 10 miles away. We had breakfast at Salem Diner, built in the 1940s to resemble a futuristic train (all metal and curves) and pretty much unchanged since then. After that we visited the Peabody Essex Museum - a fantastic collection of native american, Japanese, Chinese and Indian artifacts mainly related to the history of trade with the Europe. The only downside was that the museum had nothing to do with Salem. The rest of Salem was disappointingly tacky and rundown, with most of the attractions focussing on witchcraft and ignoring the small historical detail that there never actually were any witches and actually 16 innocent people were murdered purely as the result of public hysteria. The abundance of shops selling 'healing

crystals', psychic readings and other tawdry nonsense draws a sizeable number of goths which made the place feel a lot like Whitby in Yorkshire (look up Whitby Abbey if you've not been there) but more run down, a bit like Scarborough infact :)

In the afternoon we returned to Boston and visited the Harvard campus and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) museum. For an ivy league university Harvard was a bit underwhelming - the scale and granduer are nothing compared to Stanford in California or even Oxford and Cambridge back home.

The MIT museum on the other hand easily lived up to our expectations, featuring a collection of robots, strange mechanical art installations and some cool holograms - it had a superbly nerdy gift shop too where I overheard two boys arguing about how a spherical die worked. Nerds!

From MIT we walked across the river to the Back Bay area, stopped off at a guidebook recommended 'Dive Bar' for a beer and then went up the Prudential Tower, the second tallest building in Boston after the John Hancock Tower (which doesn't have a public gallery). You get a really good view of the city including a birds-eye view of Fenway Park where we could see the Red Sox players warming up for the second game in the series against the Indians. We had dinner in an interesting restaurant which was decorated with record covers and also had an Elvis shrine and christmas tree in the corner... hmmm!

We finished the evening with a drink in the original Cheers bar. Contrary to the Cheers theme tune they didn't know our names but we enjoyed the experience anyway. The drinks measures were huge, I had a whisky and it was easily a double shot, probably more. Possibly why it cost me $10!