The City of Brotherly Love

In the morning, we said goodbye to the people who left.  It was kind of a sad morning, but we kept going and had a fun day anyway. 

When we arrived in Philadelphia, we went to Reading Terminal.  It’s like a huge market where everybody comes together to sell all different kinds of food – Indian, German, grilled cheese, lots of Amish stores, and of course, Philadelphia cheesesteak.  Right away the people we noticed were a little bit nicer than New York – they said excuse me and I’m sorry when they bump into you.  We found a German store and we were like “ Oh my gosh, this has everything you normally don’t see in the stores here!”  There were a lot of fun things to  see, like a used bookstore with lots of old books about Buddhism.  There was also a tarot card store, an herb store, and lots of unique food from all over the world, plus chocolate covered waffle cones with ice cream!

After lunch, we went to the Constitution Center. The presentation at the beginning was really cool – we were all sitting in a circle around the center of the room, instead of just in front of a stage listening to a person talk.  The woman did a great job memorizing all the things that she had to say, and it was presented in a really interesting way.  We would have liked to learn a little bit more about how other countries influenced the making of the U.S. government, but we learned a lot of other things.  The rest of the center had a lot of information, but it wasn’t so big of a place that we got bored.  It was just the most important things about the most important periods and events.  We thought the timing was great – not too short and not too long.  Plus we had time to go to the souvenir shop!  We also really liked that they had all the different flags from every state.  It was really a learning by doing kind of place – very interactive, we got to be involved.

Then we met our tour guide, Jen, who was really cool.  She could be really loud!  We moved pretty quickly because we had a lot to see! We saw the first post office, Benjamin Franklin’s house and where he is buried, City Hall, the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and Elfreth Alley, which looked kind of like Amsterdam with the really narrow houses. We got to go inside of Christ Church, where the guide inside really told us information that was meant personally for us as international students.

We also made a stop at the Philadelphia Art Museum, where we got to run up the famous stairs that Rocky trains on in the movies.  One Brazilian guy carried a girl all the way up the stairs! 

After our tour, we went to dinner at a restaurant called Bridget Foy’s in a really cute part of town.  Dinner was really good, we had a lot of choices, but a lot of us got cheesesteak, since we are in Philadelphia!  The atmosphere there was really cool, too.

Finally, we had a bus ride from Philly to D.C. and arrived at our new hotel. We were really excited to choose our roommates for our new hotel in Washington D.C.  We feel like we have a lot of freedom on this trip, and we really enjoy it.  Freedom, like the Liberty Bell stands for!

Emilia - Germany
Anne - Germany
Midori - Japan
Jimin - South Korea