Boston Tea Party Museum and the Boston Public Library

For the first time since our arrival, we went into the center of Boston. As is customary for our arrival to a new US city, it was raining. Thankfully, the most rainfall happened during the night. This type of heavy rainfall even has a name in New England. It is called a 'Noreaster', which are strong short-lived rainfalls that fly in from the Atlantic on to the coastline.

Yup, it rained again

 
Thankfully, with some rearrangements of our bed, if I may dare to call it that, we slept fine and until late in the morning. I cannot remember the last time, I slept until 10:00am, but there we made it :-D

It left us with the last remnants in the morning in the form of heavy drizzle that kept on during the entire day. Therefore, we did not stay outside for too long. From what I could see, the center of Boston is kinda samey to New York and Chicago. Smaller, but still tall buildings, cleaner, though, and the Irish descendant population is less afraid to show their colours in form of Irish pubs and the like ;-)

Our first stop was the Boston Tea Party & Ships Museum. I was really interested in this part of US history as the term is being flung around quite heavily in current politics. The Republican Party has apparently a very strong wing that feels quite strong to this movement.

In the back, you can see the Boston Tea Party Museum

My first surprise (that Isi actually knew about) was that the museum tour was in fact a re-enactment that led to the events and they asked the audience to take part no less. It was very well done, with two actors who wore the garments of the time and animated the "mob" (audience) to feign outrage in form of shouts like "Fie!" and "Boo" with the appropriate hand gesture, as well as, shouts of agreements.

They also asked the audience to have some speaking roles. So I "donned the coat" of one Thomas Porter (a speaking role no less), who was outraged at the taxation of the British king for ink, paper and now even dice and playing cards. Given my gambling problem, I was very outraged. My friend Josiah Wheeler (Isi), a housewright, agreed with me strongly.

Here are the words of Thomas Porter that I had to shout into the crowd as an outraged and taxed gambler with withdrawal symptoms

The two actors were very adept at reconstructing the feeling that led to the events that transpired on the 10th December 1773. There was a lot of rage and anger in America towards the British King as they were heavily taxed for everything, but had no voice in the British parliament. Also the supposed protection of the colonies by the British was not there and they felt exposed. If anything the presence of the "red coats" felt more like they were being guarded and watched, not protected.

The straw that broke the camel's back was a decision by the British king to help the East India Trading Company to sell a large shipment of Tea free of taxation in America, which meant they would be able to undercut all competitors and sell at a huge profit at the same time.

This was discussed in a heated town debate (that we re-enacted) and it was then decided that they would storm the three ships that lay in harbour and break open the tea crates and drop the tea into the harbour. They had to do this anonymously as there were still loyalists among the population and so they stormed under the cover of night the ships, overwhelmed the 8 man strong crew (mostly adolescent boys) and dumped more than 400 crates of 500 pounds each into the water, sending the ships back empty handed.

One of the leaders of the "outraged rabble of patriots" showed us underdeck to see what a typical ship from the 18th century looked like

"This" was the event that would later be described as the "Boston Tea Party". As is often the case, it had nothing to with liberating the Americans from the English, they just felt unjustly treated and wanted a voice. England's response, however, caused one tiny step at a time, the start of the war of independence.

Still in character, I, Thomas Porter, dumped "tea" into the port in Boston

My dramatic partner in crime, Josiah Wheeler, was no less eager to drop some tea into the bay.

The oppressive behaviour of the English, who, let's be honest, until then was quite successful in entering a new land, butchering the people and taking it for themselves, was not exactly a behaviour that suited de-escalation. So, the British alienated even their loyalists and made the thus far separate states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, etc. join forces and for the first time call themselves Americans and fight for a common cause. Interestingly, the people leading the strike against the ships already called themselves patriots.

In the process of this tour, we then went onto a ship and looked at the interior, while angrily throwing tea crates into the water and then watching well made films on the developments that led up to the War of Independence.

Overall, this museum was fantastically done. Entertaining and informative at the same time. Now that I have seen how the US sees its own history, I understand a fair bit more about their behaviour. I always found it odd, that they threw around the words 'liberty' and 'freedom' so much, but I assume this story of liberation was told many times over in school and at uni and at every July 4th, I would imagine

After this first stop, we made our way to the Boston Public Library. Why would we do that? It is actually quite a nice and old building and it is one of the few buildings that are free to enter.

The lovely garden in the old part of the library. This makes a lovely spot to read during a sunny day.

Again, I was quite surprised, the BPL is actually a very modern and new building with a lot of actions that I strongly approve of. The modern part is actually annexed to the old part, so you have a building with glass facades that seamlessly goes over into a marble stone-floor staircase with frescos followed by a beautiful open sky garden in the center.

The staircase of the old part of the Boston Public Library.

The library is well equipped with modern PCs and from what I could see, there were regular adult learning programs of all kind in there, even python programming 101 course, as well as a vast library of books, CDs and DVDs. I was very impressed. If I had such a library at my fingertips, I might actually visit there now and again, as well.

Once we finished looking at the library, we made our way to Chinatown for some delicious dumplings and horrible service as we are used to from Asian restaurants on this side of the pond. Completely filled up and another meal worth of food in a box in our fridge, I shall now conclude this blog entry.

Good night :)