The US East Coast Travelogue II: Experience, Notes and Observati

Travelogue II: Baltimore

We lived in a hotel close to the BWI. It looked very luxurious and marvelous. Room was decorated with the brilliant curtains and traditional pictures. All shower staffs were provided and even included makeup issues. Expense for the hotel was $130/night, which was less than our budget. The disadvantages were the hotels didn’t provided breakfast and especially the heating system didn’t have enough power to make room worm up. The terrible thing was once upon a time we had to get up in the middle of the night to call a servicer and told her our room was too cold to sleep. It seemed that the heating system was never working.

Mr. White reminded that people in the east coast are not as friendly as in the center region. They would not like to take any eye contact, nod at people in passing and say hello to strangers.  If someone begins speaking to you on the streets, they probably have decided you are a tourist and that they can rip you off. In Baltimore, we verified his reminder. Mostly, people would not like to help us when we asked for the directions. If we went up the main streets, we asked a police officer. If we had to go down the local alleys, we asked a store employee rather than a random person. But sometimes it was not really correct. 

One day evening, we were going to fill in gas at a gas station. The parking there was difficult and using their restroom was even more difficult. When we filled in gas and tried to find a restroom in the convenient store, owner didn’t want tell us where it was. He even pushed us leave the station as soon as possible. He did want us to take the parking room so that affected his business. We had to find a supermarket to solve our “problems”. Shopping there was not making us feel comfortable because shoppers liked fighters. A thing made us surprised. We didn’t know when and why someone dropped something in our shopping car. At the gate of the supermarket, we saw that several young men asked for money. From then on, we tried very hard to stay on the main streets of all the cities of the east coast and never went down dark alleys at night.

The old town of Baltimore deserves to visit. It is not far away from BWI. Originally, we were going to visit the first Washington museum. When getting around the museum, we found it located in a small city. Ancient European buildings drew our attention and attracted us to drive around the city for two cycles. Unexpectedly, we found the Princeton University, which was in the center of the town. It was hard to find a parking space, so we didn’t get chance to take a campus tour.  Back to the museum area, we parked on the roadside paid $8 for one time and tried to get in the museum. Unfortunately, it was raining. The walkway was constructed by the uneven bricks. The wheelchair was not easy to go access to the museum. We were not able to visit the museum this time. But, looking at the city so closely was an unexpected achievement.