Our First Day Out

A Train Day Trip To Philadelphia

After a few weeks in the apartment, we decided it was time to see something. We still didn't have a car, but there was a train, and that was enough to get us to Philadelphia.

We bought tickets for the Big Bus - the hop-on hop-off kind - and spent the day riding the top deck, getting off wherever something looked interesting. The Liberty Bell was smaller than we'd pictured, tucked into its glass pavilion with a line of people waiting to see it. Independence Hall was next, where a guide walked us through rooms that felt surprisingly ordinary for how much had happened in them.
We stopped at LOVE Park and took the obvious photo, the one everybody has.

Then the Art Museum - but really, the steps. The Rocky steps. We'd seen them in a film long before we ever imagined standing at the bottom of them, and there was something funny about that: a piece of America we'd known from a screen in India, now just a flight of stairs in front of us. We climbed them the way everyone does, slower than we expected, and turned around at the top to look back at the city. Someone else was already doing the arms-up pose. We took our photo with the Rocky statue too.

The Museum of Illusions took up a good chunk of the afternoon. Tilted rooms, mirror tricks, the two of us taking turns photographing each other looking ridiculous. It was the most we'd laughed since landing.

Dinner was at Veda - Indian food, familiar spices, a menu we didn't need to decode. We ate slowly and stayed a while.

The train back was quiet. But it was a different quiet than the one we'd left the apartment with.