USA trip: Boston, MA

I went to visit Sarah in Boston, home to Harvard and MIT. It was chilly in Boston when I was there, the temperature hovering around low 20s. Boston is a beautiful city with old buildings dating back to the 1700s and 1800s. Victorian homes and dime a dozen (but rent is expensive as with most cities).

The city is peppered with old cathedrals, clock towers, brick buildings. On the bottom left you see the Quicy Market, that’s the tourist area of Boston where they sell random tourists items like lobster toys, tea (think Boston Tea Party), and t-shirts. Talking about lobster toys, we started to goof around with the merchandise:

Goofing around with the lobster hats, heh. We also went to Little Italy of Boston for the Farmer’s Market. There was a wide variety of fruits and vegetables on sale. The Farmer’s Market caters to real people who stay in the city, not tourists, so prices are fair. Strawberries can be as cheap as USD1 for a big box, which would have cost $5-6 SGD in Singapore.

While leaving the Little Italy area, I saw a real cute sign in a park:

Aww. Cute way of trying to tell people not to feed birds. See how the pigeons in the picture are drawn slightly plump too. Talking about cute things, I have to show you a picture of Sarah’s knife stand at home.

It’s so satisfying drawing out and keeping the knives. *stab stab stab*

I toured the universities too. Besides taking the T (the subway system) through Boston University (for this stretch the T is above ground), I also went to Harvard and MIT. It is just across a river from where my friend stays, and just a short bus ride away.

(Photos of both universities are mashed together, I am lazy to annotate which ones are which.)

I didn’t like MIT. Parts of the school, especially the stretch between MIT and Harvard are slums. Electrical cable running amok overhead, deserted tractors (WTF), dilapidated buildings. In contrast, Harvard was much nicer. Lots of greenery for students to lounge and read or just catch up on their tan, nice archaic buildings (you are talking about the oldest university in USA), fountains, a nice little shopping town called Harvard Square, which sells kickass iced tea for a warm-ish summer day.

See that statue seated there? And how one shoe is gold? This is the supposed statue of John Harvard. Tourists like to touch his golden shoe (which really turned gold due to too much touching) claiming that whoever touched it will get a perfect 4.0 GPA (straight As). Evidently just a lousy urban legend, seeing how I touched his shoe too. On another note, this is not the real John Harvard statue. According to the Harvard website, this John Harvard is a conceived image, not a replicated image. So it does not resemble John Harvard at all. Another fun fact about Harvard – it is not founded by John Harvard, just named after him.

Nonetheless Harvard is a nice place. I’m not so sure it’s still as nice in the frigid Boston winter though.

And now a parting shot of a nice sunset at one of the marinas: