USA Holiday, November 08 (Philadelphia)

Had a spare day to visit another city. I wanted to go to Boston but the bus was going to take nearly 4 hours I think, so Philadelphia seemed like a much better option at under two hours.

This is actually just the Amtrak train station. At the Dunkin' Donuts inside they were selling 6 for $3 - bargain!

Market Street.

The Museum Of Art was just a little north of the city centre, so started there first. Despite being one of the largest cities in the USA, I soon found that the city was very spacious and very quiet on this particular Sunday. Maybe everyone had gone down to the Eagles game.

The museum.

The Ben Franklin Parkway (that's a street) that leads from the city out past the museum.

The Rocky statue is at the bottom of the steps, over to the left.
I still need to upload a photo of it.

Downtown Philadelphia, from my brief encounter, seemed a little similar to Melbourne in terms of size and number of shops. Melbourne probably has more high rise buildings in the downtown area though. Most of the shops are supposedly located along two streets that run the length of the city east-west. As I've mentioned already, not many shopping centres to be found in city centre areas. The people in Philadelphia seem to not like giving way to pedestrians very much, so I nearly got run over a couple of times.

City Hall from Broad street. I think it's called that because it really is so wide.
Looks pretty cool in the other direction.

After you walk the length of the city, you reach the "Old City". Basically this is the remains of the old colonial buildings that were the city center many decades ago. Rather than knocking it down or whatever, they built the new, modern city alongside it.

Outside the Liberty Bell Centre. Independence Hall up ahead.

Had a walk around the old city, but didn't know a whole lot about what I was looking at or the significance of it. The funniest thing was they still have those old, incredibly bumpy roads that are made simply by laying down a whole bunch of rocks. You would not want to drive around here.

First Bank of the United States.

And this is First National Bank, which is different, somehow.

Also in the old city was the site of Ben Franklin's house. There was basically next to nothing preserved, but they did that have this underground museum place there.

Just down the street was the location of the house from The Real World: Philadelphia, which was filmed back in 2004. It has since been converted, as you can see.

Went across to Lincoln Square (park) which was supposed to have a neat miniature golf course that contained all of the monuments and iconic locations of Philadelphia, but I was unable to find it.

So somehow I was able to get through everything on my todo list by about 3pm. Kind of surprising, but the fact that we didn't actually go inside or tour anywhere, just go past, contributed to this. Also the fact that I only planned to see and do things that were within the city centre.

Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier.

So that was it for Philadelphia, had some dinner and headed back to New York.