Summer in USA – Philadelphia

Hey.

Another of our adventure was Philadelphia.

I mentioned our host’s nephew Kevin in articles before as our tour guide and trip planner and he has done his job once again. He was very passionate about Philadelphia, even though we didn’t know much about it. It wasn’t a very touristy popular destination from what we’ve heard therefore we weren’t as thrilled about this trip as Kevin.

Our road trip from Avon to Philly started early in the morning.

We weren’t even near Philadelphia when something memorable happened. We got pulled over by a cop on a highway for speeding. This was my first pullover ever! I like to think that my English is on a higher level but I just had no idea what the cop and Kevin were talking about at all. I didn’t understand it at all. Later on, I figured out that corruption works everywhere and because of some political stuff, we got out with just a ticket. Further ride went on smoothly after that.

We got to Phillycenter, parked our car, and began our day-long journey.

Kevin showed us a bunch of historically important monuments for Americans like Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Philadelphia City Hall but it wasn’t very appealing to us to be fair. Kevin was so excited to show us Rocky steps and he was also very disappointed when we told him that none of us ever saw Rocky movies.
We visited Reading Terminal Market where we meet up with Kevin’s friends and had lunch there. My cousin wanted to see Amish people, but we didn’t have spare time to visit them so as an alternative we come up with the idea to see them at the Markets.

The most interesting trip of the day was our visit to Eastern State Penitentiary. It’s the most historic prison in America. We got our headsets and learn many interesting information. It felt so strange to walk through the same places many prisoners did.

We even saw Al Capone’s prison cell!

We saw inside of each cell and listened to stories of prisoners who lived and died there and who tried to escape the prison and how they dig the holes and many other interesting things. Kevin told us that every Halloween the Penitentiary hosts scary ghost night where people go to the building and get scared by the workers. It must be amazing I would love to experience that even though the place was quite scary for me even at daylight. It just had this strange atmosphere all around it. I understand this is not a very popular tourist attraction but I would definitely recommend this trip if you ever happen to be in Philadelphia.

We made a prank at our parents as we messaged them saying we got stop by police for speeding and now we were in prison. We were not lying thought, just the information we provide them wasn’t as it seemed at first. My uncle and aunt (cousins parents) panicked so much and started calling them right away but my parents just send me smiley faces and didn’t believe me a word 😀
Here are the photos I took there:

We had a reservation for this vegetarian restaurant I was very excited about.

I’ll write an article about my vegetarian phase and why I had to quit it soon, but at that time I was still vegetarian what was very inconvenient as my other companions love the meat. I’m sure if there is any fellow vegetarian reading this they understand how complicated is to dine at places where they serve mostly animal food and just one or two vegetarian options. You just don’t have a video menu to choose from so you just settle for anything that doesn’t have meat in it. So to be in a restaurant where I could choose everything from the menu was heaven for me. This restaurant created “meat-like” food from sprouts to make it look and taste like real meat.

Even the name of food was the same as in every other restaurant – it just wasn’t made out of animals.

My cousins were so bitchy about it cuz they didn’t have their daily meat portion and had nothing to eat in there. I mean I felt like that every day in the normal restaurant and I just had to sit it through, but when the tables turned it was unbearable for them. This ruined my stay there for a bit, but whatever, I had my first ever taco ever with “meat” imitation and I loved it.

I was quite skeptical at first because it looked just like the real meat.

We also meet up with another Kevin’s friend there and she was very lovely and we had a nice conversation.
As it was getting late we finished our diner and took our last walk through Philadelphia. It was very windy at that time so our hair is blowing away at almost every photo we took. We made another stop at a shopping mall where they had a piano in the middle of the hall and my cousin started playing.

Overall it was a very nice trip.

I felt so bad for judging it so quickly. Yes, the first few hours there were not that interested in me and consider the police stop I was sure the trip would be a disaster but it got so much better afterward. I was very surprised by the amount of tourists there.

Thank you for your attention
xo Natalia