I was thinking today about our trip to the Liberty Bell Judo
Tournament. It may have been because I
heard someone on the radio who was from Philadelphia, but I wouldn't put any
money on that for sure. I cannot
pinpoint exactly what sparked this memory, and it isn't so much the competition
I remember as the bizarre trip into the city itself, the City of Brotherly
Love.
First of all, how on earth did such a godforsaken place get
that moniker? We saw no love while we
were down there and actually feared for our lives more than a half dozen
times. Parts of the city looked like
Beirut circa 1983. All the one-way
streets met in the middle and we couldn't actually go anywhere because every
street we tried to take was one way going the wrong way. (Driving in the 'hoods of Philly is like
being a rat in a really horrifying maze only worse because there isn't any
cheese at the end.)
Once we did finally figure out where to go (and where NOT to
go, alas, too late since we had already been there), Philadelphia was not as
bad as my first impression led me to believe.
After all, we were still alive, I still had cash in my pocket that I
hadn't been robbed of, and we ended up in the Barrio, a place where I spoke the
language and there were windshields and tires on every car. Finally, we landed in Philly proper. We saw Independence Hall, the US Mint, and
the Liberty Bell. I reached out and
touched the Liberty Bell because at that time you still could get away with it. Years later some whacko with a mallet beat
the crap out of the bell before being wrestled to the ground, so now there's a
Lucite box surrounding it.
I suppose all cities have their bad sections. If visitors want to see the zoo in Boston,
they might be well-prepared to drive there rather than hop public transit
because it's really not a walking-around type of 'hood, and Joe the Gorilla
(the notorious escapee) just might be waiting alongside them at the bus
stop. But, and this is a huge but, I
cannot think of any neighborhood in Boston that has been firebombed by the government,
nor any multitude of streets that all meet in the middle leading to nowhere, nor
any neighborhoods resembling a war-torn jihad-infested country.
Then again, I haven't been to Mattapan in
a while, so I could just be talking outta my ass.
