Boston marathon takes place each third Monday in April, on Patriots’ Day. It’s a very popular event here in Boston. All the American people we know here encouraged us to stay in the city and watch it, saying it was really “inspiring”. So around noon, we were in Boylston street to cheer up the athletes. Three hours later, twos bombs exploded close to the finish line. We were at this time in Kenmore square. Police officers, firemen trucks,… everybody started to be really busy, there was a lot of confusion after hearing the 2 blasts – we didn’t really know what they were though. The marathon was stopped, we were asked to go home, we start looking for our friends visiting the city from France. Confused and sad ambiance.
It’s sad – that’s the least we can say – that such an event ended up so tragically. It’s been a few days that the city was preparing – signs everywhere, even the trees on the main streets were blossoming ; we saw runners in the streets, metro and restaurants. Everybody was asking where to watch the marathon, what were the best spots.
It’s a real pride to run this one. Qualifications are pretty hard, and the run in itself is a real, real effort, specially cause of the “heartbreaker hill”. Running Boston is a big deal, the winner earns $150,000 dollars – as a comparison, New York marathon winner has $20,000.
Go Boston ! Cheering up the runners – before the blasts – was really nice. Beautiful, strong and agile, the first runners are true athletes. Then we followed the crowd of runners, either looking exhausting or happy. There was so much runners, it seems that it would never stop. It was really impressive. But everything stopped really quickly, with tons of confusion. We have to get back home and we learned about the terrible news.
We followed news ici and on Twitter; we reassured our friends and family all around the world to tell them that we and our two friends were okay. Boston is our city now, and we’re sad for what happened.
