Every year, my travels always take me to the US East Coast simply because I have family there and being with them makes the trip more meaningful. Since kith and kin live in the New York-New Jersey area, my days there are always filled with new places to see and new things to do, aside, of course, from the customary shopping at the outlet stores and humongous malls.
Yet, I have always hankered for a side trip to any of the other East Coast states that I haven’t been to, and explore what they have to offer to first time visitors like me. So, when my elder brother decided to drive down to Baltimore to visit some friends, I decided to hitch along and see what makes the city interesting.
It was a leisurely three-and-a-half hour drive from New Jersey, with some of the scenic pit stops I have ever seen. After checking in at the Four Seasons downtown, my brother and I joined a sightseeing tour of the city and its environs.
Baltimore is the largest city in Maryland and is so much a part of US history that it has the most number of historical monuments per capita in the continental US. Moreover, one in every three buildings is listed on the United States National Register as a historical place, the most among all the cities in the entire country.
With the metropolitan area divided into hundreds of districts, a unique geographical set-up not applicable to any other city in the US, Baltimore easily earned the tag as “a city of neighborhoods.”
Its most popular tourist destination, Inner Harbor, shows the character of the city and its residents. It used to be a leading port of entry for immigrants from Europe, next only to Staten Island in New York. Today, this harbor area has shops, upscale seafood restaurants and attractions like the USS Constellation, a Civil War-era warship, berthed on the docks, and the National Aquarium which displays thousands of marine species, including the exotic ones rarely found anywhere else in the world.
The city’s service-oriented economy banners the world-famous Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins University, the city’s top taxpayers. A big chunk of the city’s workforce is into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) because they pay much more than those in other fields.
What got me even more interested was when I learned from our tour guide that the city had very famous residents—my favorite poet Edgar Allan Poe, singer Billie Holiday, and baseball legend Babe Ruth had their homes in the city. Even Francis Scott Key, who wrote the American National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was a resident of the city.
One of the places I found very interesting in our tour was the American Visionary Arts Museum, which labels itself as “an original and unabashedly idealistic art exhibition that champions the radiant and transformative power of hope.” I was amazed at the creativity and sense of humor of the approximately 25 visionary artists, most of whom are survivors of personal tragedies. Every piece of art on display was awesome.
We had very limited time for this Baltimore visit as we had to go back to an important family gathering the following day. So, after 36 hours in Baltimore, we were on the road, for the easy drive back to our family home in New Jersey.
It must have been the large dose of US history that was heaped upon us by our tour guide, because I found myself singing on the way home, “Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming…”
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YOUR FRIDAY CHUCKLE
A man goes down on his knees and proposes to a woman, “Marry me and make me the happiest man in the world.” Looking bewildered, the woman asks, “You want both?”
