April 20,2008 Salem Massachusetts

We ate breakfast at Tedann's house and then we were off to Salem. It was beautiful day today and we did not need jackets . Once we arrived in Salem about 45 minutes away from Boston we made our way to the House of the seven gables and to Nathaniel Hawthorne house. The admission was 12 dollars to get in and they took you on a tour through the house. The house was made famous by fiction Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a book called the House of the Seven Gables and he also wrote the book The Scarlet Letter.Mr Hawthorne did not actually live in the seven gables home but a relative lived there and then he wrote about it. Hawthorne's home is also on the property and overlooks the breathtaking view of salem harbor, derby wharf and the Friendship boat. The home was built in1668 by a man names John Turner. Three generations of Turner's lived in the home until the last Turner lost the home and the family fortune. It was a beautiful home to show how they lived in the 1600's. Nest we went to the Peabody Essex Museum. First we stopped and had a drink then we went on an audio tour of a 200 year old Chineese home called Yin Yu Tang. The museum brought it over to the United States and rebuilt it piece by piece next to the Museum. It was incredible how these people lived even up until 1980. There was usually 15 to 30 people living in the home and they had no electricity, a very small kitchen to fix meals, very small beds that 2 or more people slept in and a beautiful courtyard outside.You could not take pictures inside the home sorry, but I did get a picture of what the outside looked like and it is amazing. After our video tour we went and looked at the exhibits about the Yin Yu Tang. The house stood in the rural village of Huang Cun in the mountainous region of southeastern China. The ancestral home of the Huang family. It was moved to the Peabody through a partnership between the museum and the government authorities of Huizhou,the home region of the Yin Yu Tang. We watched three different movies concerning the Chineese exhibit they were fascinating. One was on the marriage of a girl and young man of the region. The couple the man was educated the young woman was not but the young mans father still let them get married. In China when the couple gets married they live at the home of the groom. In the movie the mother and sisters of the bride were crying very hard because to them marriage and going to live at the in laws is like bride is dead. The family no longer has contact with the bride because she will be living with the inlaws. This young ladys mother felt bad because her daughter did not have an education so in her dowry or money she sent with the young lady on her marriage journey was 900 pieces instead of the normal 300 it was all the mother had and she wanted to let her daughter know she loved her very much. I found it very intresting that the young man gets to choose the furniture for the new couple the furniture he had made was pink. We also went into the museum and saw beautiful thing about shipping boats. Pictures replicas and other thing pertaining to sailing. There was also an exhibit about tatooing. After our adventure at the museum we headed back to Boston. We walked to a restaurant by Tedann's house calle Jose Mcintyres. Mark had ribs and I had fish and chips. It was very good Tedann says they make the best Margaritas!