Boston, Massachusetts

Arrived in Massachusetts a little after my blog entry in Albany, NY. It took about another three hours to make it to Boston. I stopped at Springfield for dinner, which I found out is the home of James Naismith, the man who invented Basketball. Springfield is also the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame. I didn't care to visit it. I just wanted to eat and get to Boston.

When I got there it was already too dark to do anything. Driving in Boston at night is pretty tough, because the streets are not as logically engineered as some of the other city streets I've been to. Often there would be two lanes but no stripes to indicate which lane you're in. In the city proper, the streets are narrower, and during the summer there's construction, which makes it even more difficult to figure out where you're at.

I couldn't find any couch surfer to host me in Boston, or a campsite to use, so I checked into another hotel. I didn't do anything the first night. The next day, though, I explored the city. First checking out Harvard Square, home of Harvard University. Last year I considered applying to the Graduate School of Education, and it just so happened to be that I parked my car right next to that school. So I walked in to check it out.

In one of the buildings I met Thelma, the Staff Assistant of the Office of Student Affairs. Surprisingly, Thelma just moved from Temecula, California. Her husband is attending the John F. Kennedy School of Government. We had a great conversation about the Boston area and how much she liked it. She apparently has only been working at Harvard for about two months now and she enjoys it. She says she routinely deals with frustrated students who stress over the difficulty and caliber of the program. She gave me an idea of what it must be like to be a student there.

After visiting the school, I walked around the area. Harvard Square reminds me very much of the Berkeley area. It's culturally diverse, and is filled with people walking the streets, some of them tourists, others students, and peddlers. In one courtyard there was a young guy, probably a student, playing his acoustic guitar in front of a Peete's Coffee & Tea (I was extremely excited that I found a Peete's). The busy part of the area is the Harvard Square Station, the entrance to the underground subway. I would equivocate this area to downtown Berkeley's station.


I walked the other courtyards and took in the sites. There are plenty of New England architecture and statues of the Boston historical figures, as you would expect.



At one point, I was walking in the main courtyard when a Mormon missionary asked me if he could excuse himself for giving me one of his pamphlets. I ended up convincing him to take a picture of me next to the John Bridge statue.








Later, I road my bike to the other parts of Boston, where I convinced another passerby to take a picture of me in front of the Boston skyline. Further down the river, I found the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and took a picture with me in the courtyard. I walked inside to take a look at one of the buildings, and was surprised to actually see students still on campus during the summer. The atmosphere at MIT was entirely different than at Harvard. MIT, being a technical school, didn't seem to have that diverse vibe of people.

Just south of MIT is the Centanni Courtyard where I found the Boom Town Festival going on. There was a group of about a hundred people sitting on the footsteps of a nearby building enjoying some live Jazz. Apparently, from July 7th-18th the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center puts on a festival of arts and music of the people of Boston. Tonight was Stan Strickland Group which was a five piece improvisational jazz group, which I thought sounded great. It was fun to see little kids and their parents dancing carelessly in the courtyard.










Later, I rode my bike to the East Somerville area where I got a pretty good shot of the sun setting behind all the residential houses. I then ended up riding back to the Harvard Square.

During the night, and possibly because it was a Friday night, the area was thriving even more. There were more musicians on the street corners, and other entertainers putting on a show for money. I found several people sitting in front of stores listening to the Red Sox game on their radio, or in front of a flat screen that the store owner's kindly put behind their store window.







At around 11pm I left Boston, and am now in Danbury, Connecticut. I plan on leaving for Philadelphia tomorrow.