My friends and I decided to go to Philadelphia for the day yesterday to explore.
We were going to take the train in, but we realised that with a mini-van it’d actually be cheaper to drive. With a bit of luck in parking garages, we were in the city!
We toured Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Benjamin Franklin Museum, and the Edgar Allen Poe museum. Since it was Benjamin Franklin’s birthday yesterday as well, the museum was free, and as all of the other places area always free, we ended up seeing a lot for absolutely nothing! Later, we walked along the harbour and went to a restaurant where some of us, to continue being tourists, had Philly cheesesteaks.
I’m talking an English literature class on Edgar Allan Poe this semester, so seeing the house where he lived for one of his six years in Philadelphia was really cool and served as a good intro. I realised how little I actually know about him–I hadn’t known the cause of his death is still unknown, as he had just been found in Baltimore unconscious. The class will be taught by Dr. Kachur, one of my favourite professors, and I think it will have a good dose of mystery and intriguing language. Poe’s birthday is tomorrow, the nineteenth, so the museum was crowded with people, but it was still really cool to see the beaten up walls and floors and imagining Poe living there with his wife.
My favourite part of the day, however, was at the Benjamin Franklin museum where they had an armonica that I could play. Franklin had created the armonica, which looked like a series of bowls that make noises when you spin them and put your wet finger on the rim. I managed to play “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and I was very proud of myself.
We were all exhausted by the time we got back to McDaniel, but it was a day very well spent!
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