On our last full day in Boston we made the inevitable pilgrimage to the end of the Blue Line to take Zoë to Wonderland.
It was pretty weird hearing a disembodied voice on the T saying: "Next stop, Wonderland!", and I am not too sure quite what we were expecting from a place whose name conjures up all kinds of visions and expectations of extraordinariness. For a few brief years in the early 20th century Wonderland was an amusement park featuring attractions such as rollercoasters and "a re-enactment of an urban conflagration" (?). The amusement park is now a delapidated greyhound stadium near to the Suffolk Downs racetrack (both tracks have seen better days), located in the strange and lonely hinterland beyond the airport, along the North Shore.
This is Wonderland now, a strange combination of Stalinist Black Sea beach resort and Ostend in Belgium. I once spent a weekend in Ostend in 2000 with my friend Kirsten, and the memory still haunts me to this day. Ostend was full of tremendously unattractive Flemish people and Wonderland was full of mahogany-coloured pensioners sunbathing on the pavement (why? when there's a beach right there?).
In all fairness, it's pretty cool when you can hop on a train in the middle of the city and in 20 minutes be at the beach, so I'm sorry we left it until the last minute to visit this blog's namesake. We could have come to this fabled land of wonder on sunny weekends and worked on our own mahogany tans. And we couldn't even stay long when we did visit - there was so much still to do before we had to be out of the flat by noon the next day. But we were glad we finally did go and spend our last day in Boston as a family taking Zoë to Wonderland.
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