A nice cup of tea

This looked promising, but actually, although they sold tea of many varieties, and tea cups, and teapots, and coasters, and books about tea and teacups and teapots and coasters, they didn't actually make tea, pour it into a cup and let you drink it.

They did give me a wee sample of 'afternoon Earl Grey tea' in a little plastic mini-mug, but that was possibly worse than nothing at all.

On the up side, the shop was on Newbury St, Boston, which we decided to walk down en-route to the Museum of Fine Arts. Three hours later we arrived at the museum. In the meantime:
It was the pretty doorway of the otherwise utlilitarian-sounding Women's Educational and Industrial Union that struck me. The Union was an old one, founded in 1880 to help women, particularly immigrant women, support themselves by selling crafts, as well as help women workers, particularly domestic workers, gain access to legal advice:
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/organizations-wom-union.html

Now it is a very chic furniture and fashion shop. One pair of earrings I saw cost over $500, although they looked to me exactly like the kind of dangly brass and glass earrings you can buy for $15 at a market. Lucky I am undiscerning - who can afford to be so?

Also such things as:

And then it was time for lunch.

This is, from right, Rita (I think you know Rita by now?), Jane (China), and Daniel from Slovakia. An argument is developing between Rita, myself, Ingrida, and Daniel. Daniel was present for the conversation with Kayode the other night, and, moreover, as Kayode's room-mate, has had additional conversations with him, none of which deviate much from what we learned the other night. Let's say, for a start, that the professional code of conduct that exists in NZ between lecturers and their students is not practiced in Nigeria. Quite the contrary.

Daniel is a cultural relatavist; we, on the other hand, less so. The argument is unresolved, and will, no doubt, develop.

We made it to the Museum of Fine Arts in the mid-afternoon, looked at a Spanish exhibition of El Greco to Velazquez, and then, at last, a cup English breakfast tea in the gallery cafeteria. It was piping hot, there was trim milk, the tea was flavoursome. For this trip, it was enough. Later we go to Boston properly, to walk the freedom trail, visit Harvard, do the business. In the meantime I am adding Boston to the list of places I would be happy to live in.