cold night, old town

We spent the evening in Portsmouth, NH yesterday, eating delicious seafood chowder, drinking hot coffee, and nibbling on pastries in downtown Market Square.

It was a beautiful, bitterly cold winter day -- crisp with flurries in the air -- and absolutely perfect.

I described to a friend that the reason I've come to love Portsmouth so much is because it's the perfect mix of the old and the new. Portsmouth was founded in the 1600s, and retains much of its original charm and architecture.

It sort of reminds me of a small Austin. It has a downtown area similar to 6th Street, complete with the independent record stores, coffee houses, bars, and art galleries. It's amazing and very American to see the old buildings of past centuries thriving side by side with the new.