In Search of Old Beijing and whales

Chinese man on a pink bike

Last weekend, to take a break from wedding planning tasks, we decided to venture into Boston's Chinatown.  It's no Flushing (the more Mandarin version of New York's Chinatowns), but it has its charms, and it definitely beats D.C.'s Chinatown.  It was good to brush up on our rusty Putonghua (Mandarin), but we know that for the good noodles, dumplings, Xinjiang and Sichuan food that we love, we'll need to go to Flushing in Queens, or even better, go back to Beijing!





Sunday we had a postponed whale watching adventure! We got a Groupon for a whale watch off of Cape Ann and boy was it cool! Who wouldn't want to see THIS?????

A humpback breaching

Or THIS?

A big fin whale!

We did!! Sort of. Not really. Mostly what we did was this:

Looking for whales with our new binoculars

And what we actually saw was this:

A fin whale

Everyone craning to see the whale

A dog riding a surfboard, which was awesome:

It's best not to question some things...

And a shark!


It actually wasn't that dramatic, but we did see its dorsal fin, which is much smaller than the one on a whale.

All-in-all, it was not the most dramatic trip, but we had beautiful weather, a nice boat ride, and some good fresh sea-air, so we can't complain.