Now, as you know, it's not like I have very high standards for these blog posts of mine. But (and ,again, you probably can't tell) I actually do edit them to some extent, as in it's not just the words that spew out of my brain unfiltered. I figured that I could wait until I go back and edit my "book" and then post excerpts. This could be years from now. So I thought I'd post a short unedited excerpt today to celebrate the halfway point and 25,000 words and me actually staying on track. (It will make the rest of my stuff almost look good in comparison.) Here goes.
my first duck ride
My parents were coming to visit for the weekend. In terms of tourist activities, Philadelphia is pretty much limited to a small selection of Birthplace of Democracy sights and museums and a giant clothespin. I thought something outside would be a nice. Since my parents love to sail and spend their entire summers on the water, I thought a duck boat tour would be great. We could drive past the requisite historical sites, and then have a nice water cruise. Granted the water cruise would be on the industrial Delaware River, cut off from the downtown area by I 95, but still. Why not?
I didn’t know that duck tours were the cheesiest things ever. In fact, I didn’t have much experience with tours. I wasn’t sure that I had ever even been on a tour before.[1] My family didn’t really do tourist traps. We went to Disneyland once when my sister and I were in fourth grade. We stayed at the Caribbean Beach Resort—it was one of the budget ones—we didn’t have breakfast with Mickey. We missed the Electric Light Parade because of what has become known as “The Automatic Flushing Toilet Incident.”[2]
I knew that all tours were pretty touristy—but I didn’t really mind that. Obviously you are riding around on a tour vehicle, you look like a tourist. The doubledecker bus tour went right past our second floor apartment on Antique Row. Occasionally I could overhear the moderated tone of the tour guide talking about the antique shops. (I wonder if at any point in the tour they explained what the deal with Philly and rows is. Not to mention the rows and rows of rowhomes—which were built skinny with floors stacked vertically because property tax was based on the width of the houses on the street—but everything in Philadelphia is on a row, not just the antique stores. We also have Jewelers’ Row, Boathouse Row, Restaurant Row, Fabric Row, etc. ) So my idea of a tour was quite tame. The guide tells you some fun facts about the city, points out the sights, right? It did not occur to me that a tour would in any way involve dancing the Macarena while driving down South Street.
[1] Actually, I have to take that back. I did go on a tour once but it was so bad that I think I’ve attempted to block it from my memory. The one tour I went on was when my sister and I were backpacking through Europe. We were the ultimate budget travelers, and it never occurred to us to spend money to see a city that we could walk around and see ourselves. Unless someone or something was physically preventing us from seeing something, we were not going to pay to see it. But when there was a free tour offered through the hostel in Berlin, we decided why the heck not. The problem with our tour guide is that he was trying to be funny. And it was painful. And I also thought it was vaguely inappropriate when he took us to see the apartment building that had been built on the site of Hitler’s bunker. There is nothing marking it because the government didn’t want it to become a shrine. Let’s just take people on tours and point it out instead. Then our tour guide attempted a comedic dramatic re-enactment of Hitler’s last hours. For some reason, it really annoys me when I don’t know whether or not something is true. Like Hitler could have had a German shepherd named Heinrich. Did he, or was this a joke?
[2] Basically what happened is that back in 1991, automatically flushing toilets were not commonplace. They were a new invention that apparently freaked my sister out because she started crying and when I went over to her stall to see what was wrong she slammed the door on my finger and the lock caught me on the knuckle. With me bleeding and Pam wailing, my mom decided there would be no Electric Light Parade for us, and we walked against the tides of tourists, the only ones heading toward the gates what with all the magical excitement happening inside the park.
