There's no place like home

My parents came to visit and brought a little bit of home to me. We left Princeton Reading Camp and headed to Baltimore. It was a lot more like home that I could have imagined. A harbour town, that has gone into decline, losing almost all of its industries and so having to reinvent itself as something new. The Inner Harbour area has been developed in the past 15 years or so, and now is a lovely shore side area for shopping and nice restaurants. It is beautiful by night too. Around the harbour itself there are yuppy developments which we walked around. A little like some of the ones in Glasgow or the Docklands in London. It is hard on any town to lose so many of its industries. We visited the Museum of Industry and saw how they had lost newspaper/print industry with the advent of computers, car manufacturing with the advance of imported vehicles, the shipping industry - one of the few left is Domino Sugar, which provides a lot of the sugar for Hersheys Chocolate and Coca-Cola. It had us wondering what people did for employment now. Apparently the biggest employer is the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

My biggest surprise was how happy I was to return to Princeton after being away. My neighbours had left messages on my door and I was quite overwhelmed that anyone noticed I was gone. It seems that Princeton is feeling like home, at least for a while.