People Everywhere

In a city of 1.5 million people that is the core of a metro region of 6+ million, you're going to have lots of people in lots of different places. Sure enough, yesterday there were people everywhere. Our bus transfer to Please Touch Museum was on the Penn campus, which even at a relatively early hour was bustling with foot traffic. Please Touch, of course, was a veritable turnstile of kids and parents. We ended up at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts on South Broad, which was swarming with bodies. Finally, our bus ride home took us right past Franklin Field, where Penn Relays was on, which meant school bus after school bus, and runners and spectators alike milling about. (When I got home, I turned on the tube real quick and caught a few pitches of the Phillies game. So that's another 45,000+ people.)

Interestingly, all of these places had a pretty healthy mix of people, in terms of age, skin color, and (if clothes were any indicator) income level. It was a beautiful sight to see such diversity, especially when contrasted with the relative racial and socio-economic homogeneity of the neighborhoods our buses traveled through, or of the clientele of the buses themselves. I may blog in the near future about this subject in greater detail, but for now I'll just observe that while we seem to be fine mixing it up in public places, we tend to prefer to keep to our own in our residential neighborhoods and in our choice of travel mode.