Tuesday, November 13, 2007
PHILADELPHIA
I've just spent the last several days wearing out walking shoes over there. A bad experience mostly, with a few bright islands of delight.
The art museum is one of those islands. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is fantastic. One painting dated back to 1285. Much of the collection is from the 1700s, and much of the European collection is Catholic. Paintings, altar pieces, walls from a monastery, crucifixes, saints, saints, and more saints. I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven--literally.
The cathedral is beautiful. It still has a communion rail! The tabernacle is in its proper place, and so is the crucifix. They have Latin Mass twice a month.
St. Joseph church in the Old City also has the symbols in place as well, and Mass was reverent, with a Latin hymn for communion. One thing that turned me off, though, was a request that the visitors stand to receive the applause of the congregation. Where did that come from? I didn't stand and I didn't join the applause. Priest must have had a momentary lapse in his knowledge that the church is God's house, not man's.
The paintings of alchemists in their labs at the Chemical Heritage Foundation were a treat. They have a lot of them, many of which are not on display I was told, but many were. They also have alchemical texts in their rare book collection, but those are not for the tourist.
Then there was the cab driver who drove us to the airport. He spoke with an Eastern European accent and was so kind. He almost made me forget the down side, but not quite. The list is long.
Holding spot one on that list is the homeless. I have never seen so many in one place before. They are everywhere. The amount of money it costs to tour the place, juxtaposed with the stark reality of the very visible poverty casts a shadow over everything the city offers, making most of it seem superficial, frivolous, and unworthy. How can one justify historic buildings left empty at night while people have no where to find shelter? How can one justify outrageously priced food when people have nothing to eat?
And speaking of food...is it an unwritten law that all Philadelphia chocolate shall be bitter? Is there a shortage of sugar over there? Does moving to that city cause an instantaneous alteration in the palate? After asking many people who should know where to eat and being sadly disappointed at any price, the subs at the neighborhood grocery store turned out to be the best solution. That and the 12 block hike for a Taco Bell.
There was the Philadelphia Fish & Company restaurant where the crab cake was awful and the price was breathtaking. There was Jones where the food was familiar but the volume reached headache decibels.
Jim's on South Street produces a delicious cheesesteak. It helps to be patient enough to stand in line for an hour to get it and to be agile enough to eat the thing standing up. When you're walking to the place, try to ignore the iron grating over all the store fronts.
And then there was the revelry. Still reveling at 4 a.m. On the other side of my Old City Best Western window. I know it was 4 a.m. because I'd been watching the clock from the time I went to bed around 10, hoping for some blessed quiet. The police sirens that might have signaled an attempt to calm things down, didn't help the peace and quiet any. If you stay in the Best Western, be sure they don't put you in the front rooms!
Is there some reason a lot of streets lack a street marker? How often I came upon an intersection where one street was labeled and the other was not. It doesn't make following a map any easier!
What is it with the car horns? If a driver so much as takes a moment to breathe, the horns start blaring. Lack of patience behind the wheel is an understatement. Drivers are tolerant of pedestrians, but being repeatedly startled by the horns is in no way a good experience.
And then there is the lack of communication. Saturday evening phone call to the office of the Spirit of Philadelphia. What time is your ship sailing tomorrow? Do we need reservations for the luncheon cruise? 11:30 a.m. and no. When there was no activity on the ship at 11:15 Sunday, it was obvious that we had been given bad information. Another phone call informed us that the ship was not going to sail again until Friday. Why couldn't they have told us the night before and saved us the long walk?
There was a very nice man (really) running the printing press at Franklin Court, which was supposed to be closed on Monday morning and especially on Veteran's Day Monday morning (though it was open). It was supposed to have been open when we got there on Sunday at four according to the sign on the door that was locked.
But the stellar experience was standing with fourteen other people for more than an hour on the corner in the chilly wind outside the Eastern State Penitentiary waiting for the tour trolley to pick us up, while the drivers of a full trolley and a full double-decker bus told us they would have a van come to rescue us. (This was not made any more pleasant by the fact that at Eastern State the comfort facilities are port-a-pots out in the cold which were being carefully avoided by everyone I saw. It takes a while to tour Eastern State, hence upon leaving one anticipates the next stop with a certain sense of urgency, if you get my drift.) When we bought the ticket in the morning we were told the trolleys were running every 20 minutes, and they were, and very well used they were as well. Our tour got cut short when we were finally permitted to stand in the aisle on the third trolley until we got to the zoo and could transfer to the zoo trolley that at least got us to where we wanted to end up, sans narration. One of the trolley people admitted that management had failed to put enough trolleys on the street that day for the number of tickets sold. Nice.
I concluded by the time we were set to leave that Philadelphia takes its tourists for granted. After all, when you have Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, the tourists are a given, and as Coleen McCullough said in THE THORNBIRDS, "People have contempt for whatever there is too much of." That pretty much describes my experience with visiting Philadelphia.
In summary, if you want to go to Philly, do a lot of research, then give it a lot of careful thought, add some serious consideration to picking another destination, and blend with thoughts of staying home.
