The Chinatown Adventure

Long lazy hot weekends make you yearn for icy drinks, cold air conditioning, good books and what else? Well, after a while even with all these mod cons, or modern conveniences, I want to get the hell out of town. It's enough all this sitting around and debating whether it's too hot to even go out for a quick walk. So we kicked off the weekend by walking home from the Museum through Central Park with the changing lights. It's always iteresting to me how many pop events go on that park; impromptu tutorials about biology, plays, dog training, it's all there. Then on Saturday morning we took off for Philadelphia and the Late Renoir show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art via the 8:30 am Chinatown bus. It cost us $10 to get from New York to Philadelphia on a low frills bus which was certainly clean and had the identifying plastic bags hanging from the seats. No hostess, no snacks but everything worked and we go to Philadelphia's Chinatown by 10:30am. These cheap, no frills buses have been in place since the late 1990s to ferry immigrants to their jobs along the east coast and went to washington, Philadelphia, Boston and New York. Actually I think we are late catching on these buses which gave me a sense of enormous freedom because now we can actually discuss going to Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum.