Tea parties, freedom and the intellectually minded

I’m slowly catching up! I’m posting this from Boston – but Boston 2.0; because after leaving Boston I went to Toronto and now I’m back in Boston for Independence Day. Not too shabby I’d say in catching up a little :)


My trip from Philadelphia to Boston was once again with Megabus. I actually had to change buses in New York City. NYC is so iconic, you just... you know you’re there. It’s a recognisable skyline. I was getting all hyped up for NYC as we arrived on the bus, listing lyrics from I Want It All on my Twitter account (Megabus Wi-Fi still rocks) and then I had about two hours in New York City so I was able to see a little bit and have a piece of pizza and a pretzel and then just as I was all hyped up on NYC fever I had to go join the queue for my Boston bus – which in itself was amusing. NYC is the Megabus hub and it’s literally just a sign on the road just outside of Penn Station; and masses of people waiting for different buses in one big mob of people. Finally they called for our bus to start lining up – at least, we thought they did, because as I’m standing behind some hot gay boys we were all like ‘is this the Boston queue...’ and no one really knew. The bus that was before ours going to DC had been loaded and yet these people were being allowed to come up late – like, ten, fifteen minutes after it was meant to depart – and were getting on; this one lady had about 239508 suitcases and they seemed to just keep appearing from somewhere and she was being sent to the Megabus office across the road to pay for excess luggage. Meanwhile our bus is double parked and it can’t pull in because these idiots are holding up the line and we were like, seriously, if this was plane, you wouldn’t be getting on. Finally I was on the bus, in my seat, and these other idiots were holding everyone up because they had ten of them and they wanted ten seats together. Sorry, it’s a bus, you just get on and sit where there’s room and if you’re picky you need to get there early and be at the front of the line. It was so utterly ridiculous and I felt like saying ‘just sit the eff down and shut up.’ Like an hour and a half later we were finally on the road heading out of the city – it seriously took like an hour to fight through all of the NYC traffic and the bus crawled all the way from downtown along the west side heading uptown. My wi-fi cut out about half way through the ride but nonetheless it all was okay.


My biggest worry was that I didn’t actually have a set of directions to my hostel. I have this ‘travel guide’ that I put together at home with all of my bookings (transport and accommodation) and it has specific directions to the hostels that weren’t in my guidebook – like, after getting out of x subway station turn left here, right there, left here and then the hostel will be on the right. But because this hostel was in my guidebook (you know, the one I left in DC) I’d just typed up the subway directions and to get out at Hynes/Convention Center and after that I didn’t know. I’d found a crappy cartoon like map at the bus station that I seriously could not locate the street that my hostel was on. My back up plan was that I’d call Jess and get her to look it up on Google Maps and find directions for me but luckily there was a locality map at the subway station and I found the street on there and all was good.


I was so freaking excited to be in Boston that I didn’t care that the shitty HI hostel was a bit bland and the room was really hot and I was on a top bunk with a rickety railing. Didn’t care about any of it. Normally arriving at a hostel at 7pm I’d probably just get some dinner and then chill but the Boston fever had me after getting dinner going for a walk in the neighbourhood for about an hour. I just had this wonderful vibe right there from the beginning. I’ve always wanted to go to Boston – I used to be really, really intensely involved in the TV show The Practice which was set in Boston and since then I’ve kind of loved the city. And then Dawson’s Creek – the College Years – was in Boston and it goes on with things that always had me feeling more of a pull toward Boston than any other US city. Evening 1 as I was super tired was already living up to my expectations and I was so excited to get going the next day that I was actually awake and raring and ready to go, leaving the hostel by 9am – you have to realise how early this is in Dani time. It was Sunday and so by default Sunday was my touristing in Boston day and Monday was for Cambridge and the college tours; because the college tours didn’t run on the weekend. I started out by walking the Boston Freedom Trail, taking my time and taking a few hours to do it. When you finish the Freedom Trail you’re kind of nowhere near the subway and I wasn’t familiar with the bus system so I had to walk a fair ways to get back to the subway. I was looking on the subway map contemplating the rest of my itinerary for the day and out of pure curiosity I just had to take the blue subway line destined for ‘Wonderland.’ Turns out that Wonderland is more like a wasteland on one side with the beach on the other side – so I got to go dip my toe in the Atlantic Ocean :) I did some research later on, wondering why exactly this station is called Wonderland and it turns out that AGES ago, like, a hundred years ago almost, there was an amusement park called Wonderland which is now a Greyhound Station Parking Area – like where all the Greyhound buses sleep while they’re not operating. So there’s a bit of trivia for you.


I headed to the harbour area where I spent a good amount of time wandering around. Quincy Market is a short walk from the harbour so I’d gotten the subway to the Quincy station and spent some time in that area first; I’d already been through while doing the freedom trail that morning but a few hours seems to make a world of difference in the liveliness of the area; there were now heaps more stalls and these like, ‘British Guards’ and they did a ‘Changing of the Guard’ ceremony (read: a comedy routine.) Then I headed to the actual waterfront area, which I adored (it’s funny. I don’t like swimming a lot, I don’t sail or anything like that, but I loooove taking photos at waterfronts with boats). It looked like it was going to storm and it started to sprinkle so I headed back toward the subway and thought it was time for my afternoon rest. I chilled at the hostel for a couple of hours (when you’re fair like me, you kind of do this automatically for skin protection reasons, even with all the sunscreen in the world it isn’t good to be out in the sun for too many hours straight).


I then went back out for a walk along the Charles River. If you’re familiar with Boston, my hostel was sort of between Back Bay and Fenway Park; taking the most direct walking route to the water was only about ten minutes at which point I was right across the river from MIT. I walked a long way, pretty much right into Boston city but going along the waterfront. I wasn’t really sure quite where I could cut inland to find the subway, I was just playing it by ear, but I actually timed it pretty well – where I cut inland I’d wound up at the Boston Common and Public Gardens – super, super pretty and muchly enjoyable. Except for the whole thing where I was wandering around trying to find the public bathroom, finally found it and it was closed. Hence that when I ducked into Starbucks just near the park, there was a giant queue for the bathroom; and then I went to McDonalds – same thing. They had ONE TOILET for everyone and there was a sign specifying that it was for customers only and I crossed my legs and bought a crappy burger and made myself eat it (didn’t enjoy it at all, problem with all this North American fast food is that McD’s is really really crappy in comparison to some of the other ones) and then got in the bathroom queue which was filled with all these people breaking the rules and not buying from McD’s and taking FOREVER. I felt like saying, just hurry up, get in do your thing and get out and if you’re doing something that’ll take longer than get out of the queue because I was SERIOUSLY about to pee my pants. This is one of the biggest problems with travelling, seriously, locating bathrooms when you need them. You drink more water while you’re walking around and stuff and you need to pee more and it’s just a horrible cycle.


By now it was pushing 8pm so I just headed back to my hostel where I was still a bit hungry even after my gross burger so I grabbed a slice of pizza and then spent a couple of hours relaxing and catching up with some of my writing and whatnot. I was prepared to get up early again the next morning – with two college tours to squish into one day.


Actually I should note at this point that for all its run-downness, HI hostels usually have a really great breakfast and this hostel was no exception. Cereal and toast is common fare but they also had bagels, lots of options of spreads, and not only did they have coffee but they had hot chocolate powder so I was able to make a mocha :) A hostel with a decent breakfast can make such a difference to starting your day; if there is no breakfast or a breakfast that only goes for an hour and you miss it or a breakfast that you don’t want, you get set back with having to spend the first half hour of the morning in search of whatever it is that you need – in my case, often a Starbucks suffices and there is one on just about every street corner in most cities here.


Anyway, so, I had researched the times of the free campus tours and I was attending the 10am tour of Harvard University and the 3pm tour of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The Harvard tour was more of a historical tour – they have separate potential future students tours that you can register for if you’re a high school student/family of said student. It was run by a student though (hot nerd alert – you just know how intelligent this guy is, he’s at Harvard to start with, and just some of the words in his vocabulary, I was blinking at him. He was a major of French Literature – he’s partial to Economics also however the Harvard school of Economics is quite prestigious and therefore the class sizes are huge and as he explained to us, he prefers having more individual contact time with professors and in his major there is never more than fifteen students in a class. Anyway so because it was run by a student, people were asking questions about the academic life and what not that sort of gave the tour a balance between history and present reality. I was quite amused by the fact that still in professors contracts is written in that they have the right to bring their livestock to the college and let them graze on the grass in the Harvard Yard; and we were told of a professor who retired about a year and a half ago who decided it would be humorous to exercise said right and brought in a cow from his farm in Connecticut and let it graze which all the freshman supposedly were spun out by. Another amusing part of the tour was when we were told about how ‘this is the building were the university president’s office is... and the two upper floors are freshman dorms.’ Apparently they are very ‘selective’ when deciding what freshman to put into those dorms and when you start at Harvard and fill out your housing forms they ask questions about your likely hours that you’ll keep, the type of music you listen to, what your favourite activities are, that sort of thing. I got to get my photo of the statue of John Harvard which is evidently the third most photographed statue in the United States – only the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial are photographed more. Funny story though is that this statue is also known as the statue of lies because it isn’t actually Harvard – they don’t know what Harvard looks like because the pictures they had of him were burnt down in this fire in the library many, many years ago and it was just a random person used as a model for the statue.


The whole Harvard area is quite cute, I do really like the vibe of Cambridge. I went and had a frappuccino at Starbucks after the tour and it was fascinated being surrounded by various students who are taking summer courses, slogging away with their books. I was truly surrounded by so much intelligence and it rather made me feel a bit inferior.


I hopped onto the subway to go to the Kendall/MIT station; the subway is about a five – ten minute walk from the main part of the college, but where I got off the subway there was a whole little funky area of Cambridge including the college co-op store and various eateries. MIT is a very recognisable school if you’re into particular movies – two of my favourite movies ever use MIT as a setting – Good Will Hunting and 21 – and so for me it was really, really cool being there. I was there early even taking a longer route to walk from the subway station to the area where the tour was leaving so I used the free MIT wireless (thanks MIT) on my iTouch to look up where the closest Subway was – it was right across the street in the student union haha. Ate my first American Subway for this trip (I had it about five times last trip so it wasn’t that exciting, and it was actually rather disappointing because they’d ran out of the bread that I wanted and then they’d ran out of the cookie I wanted – but I did get TWO cookies to compensate/they were still warm and they were stuck together haha.


The tour of MIT was really cool, the tour guide has this sort of obsession with MIT hacks (MIT students are sort of known for performing these elaborate practical jokes, like somehow getting a police car onto the roof of the MIT dome, changing the famous lettering that is high on the ceiling in the main MIT hall and leaving it there for weeks until someone noticed) and told lots of stories of them throughout the ‘technical stuff’. We got to hear a bit about housing life and how it works differently at MIT with trying to ploy people to join a particular house with these parties during the first week of the year with different themes – i.e. one house has a jello swimming pool, one lines all the walls with layers and layers of bubble wrap. Harvard feels pretentious to me, MIT has this sort of self deprecating nerdish vibe to it, in its co-op stores with the merchandise they have all these shirts with nerdy slogans and things that I found amusing.


My really awesome day was marred by the end of the day, when I was on the subway heading back to the hostel. The green line subway that my hostel is on isn’t like a train, it’s like a trolley but underground, it’s very bumpy and screechy and not at all stable. It was late, around 7pm, and the trolley was really, really crowded, I was standing cramped in the middle. A blind lady with a cane got onto the trolley and not one person offered her their seat. I turned around at the people closest to me in seats, these Valley girl looking things with their high heels and shopping bags and I glared at them. I don’t care how long your day has been, I don’t care how sore your feet are – YOU GIVE UP A SEAT FOR A BLIND PERSON. I was really, really, really upset about this, I can’t explain just how upset. The poor lady was like, clutching to a pole in the corner and people just kept piling on and she was getting more squished and all these people just stayed sitting and I seriously just felt... I felt like this is one of those examples of why the world has negative opinion of Americans and American culture; that anyone could have been brought up in such a manner. Even on the London tube which gets absolutely insane during peak hour, people offer seats to those that they should – the handicapped, elderly, pregnant women.


By the time I got back to my hostel it was pushing 7pm, so I pretty much just had dinner and that wrapped up my evening – ranting about the above situation for ages on Twitter.


That one incident aside, I really really love Boston. Just something in the air perhaps? The culture, the vibe, the architecture. It all kind of calls out to me. I’m headed back there now (I write this on the plane from Toronto to Boston) just for a couple of nights so I’ll be there for July 4th which I’m super excited for – the hostel is a ‘family friendly no alcohol’ type place but even without alcohol, there’s events going on around the city and evidently there’s a fireworks show on the Charles so hopefully it’ll be a great day :)