Gone in a Phlash

Having secured an apartment very near the Penn campus yesterday--the ideal little studio I mentioned in my last post--I spent a little time today exploring Philadelphia further. I started out the day by walking to Reading Terminal Market, a giant food court inside the old Philadelphia terminus of the Reading Railroad (yes, the one of Monopoly fame). Reading Terminal Market really is something to see. Food of every nationality and description is on offer, in addition to such sundries as Amish crafts and cookbooks (yes, there's a whole stall devoted to nothing but cookbooks). After wandering up and down the aisle, I decided to have a turkey dinner at a place that sold nothing but gobblers. Having missed Thanksgiving two years running, I can say the tender turkey on sale there all but brought tears to my eyes.

Once I had sated myself on turkey, I set off along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. A giant city beautification project of the 1920s and 1930s, Benjamin Franklin Parkway aspires to be Philadelphia's Champs Elysees. It goes in a diagonal from near City Hall to the Philadelphia Zoo. Festooned along either side of it, I discovered, are flags of many nations. The flags fly either from flagpoles or from strings suspended over the roadway, but are in either case marked out so that viewers know which country's flag they are looking at. I was delighted to spot the flags of both Russia and Ukraine along the Parkway.

One site reachable from the Parkway is the central branch of the Free Public Library in Philadelphia. The building easily rivals the central branch of the New York Public Library in beauty and grandiosity--though it has no lions out front to guard the books. I went in just long enough to use the Internet and book onward bus and hostel reservations for my trip to Boston on Sunday. But I got to go up the library's giant main staircase on the way to the computers, which was quite a treat.

During the warmer months, Philadelphia runs a system of tourist buses called Phlash Buses. These only go up and down Market Street--one of the main axes of the city, the other being Broad Street--and the Parkway. After leaving the library, I took a Phlash bus to one of its ends--a riverside walk called Penn's Landing--and back up to the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Fairmount Waterworks. Built in the early 19th century to supply the water needs of the growing city, the Waterworks are a neoclassical masterpiece and, during their years of operation, were a major tourist destination in the city. Though closed for their original purpose for a full century, the Waterworks now house a museum devoted to how water and sewage system in general, and Philadelphia's in particular, work. I could tell the museum was geared mainly to schoolchildren, but it was nevertheless interesting to walk around in it and see some of the 19th-century gearing on display.

You might say today has gone in a Phlash. I can't wait to see how tomorrow goes.