Boston and Cambridge
Sep. 14th, 2006 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI got home yesterday morning at seven am, to find it had turned into autumn in my absence and the path outside, the last quarter-mile to the beach, has been cordoned off entirely by the police. I haven't had the mental integrity to find out why, yet. I got back and fell asleep and woke up and fell asleep and woke up and stayed up all night writing because I was jet-lagged and got up because there was a man coming to tow my car at nine am who did not turn up until three so I couldn't sleep. I am so, so tired and so wide awake and it is four hours earlier in Boston and an hour earlier than that in Indiana and in Chicago there is a DEMON IN LEIGH'S BASEMENT OMG I have no idea who I am any more. Well, I do, sort of. I'm having this thing where I've decided the world hates me and the universe hates me more and that the best thing I can do is sleep for two weeks. But I fail at life, because I can't even do that.
Urgh. Indiana. I got out of there just after Nupur's Homecoming, and it was awful. I fully appreciate that it probably didn't have the right impact on me, given that I didn't have the build-up or the cultural immersion or whatever, but, still. You know. Hundreds of people, all decked out in the same colours, and so dreadfully earnest. I'm talking only about those of Nupur's friends I met, of course. I was thinking about what would have happened at Merchants' if we'd been sat down and told that we had to spend a day cheering on a sports team. In fact, we did have those, every year - whoo, Sports Day! - and I loved it, because it was the perfect opportunity for a mass skive. And really, I was pretty well-behaved at school. Everyone skived. I can't remember a single occasion on which people were so enthused about anything. Maybe it's endearing - that Nupur and her friends care so much about their school that they plaster its logo all over their clothing and voluntarily give up their evenings to sit on uncomfortable bleachers - but for me, entirely alien.
But no more on Indiana. I went to Boston, and had a marvellous time. I loved the city with a passion - I loved the historic pretty buildings randomly mixed with glass and steel, I loved the Freedom Trail, I loved the flowers, the narrow winding streets with names and not numbers, I loved the rhythm of it, the way it was full of young people and wildly vaccilating weather, I loved it so much. (Seriously, the weather was bizarre. The first day I was there, it was thirty degrees and I was hunting out t-shirts. The second day, it was a drizzly ten degrees. The third day, it was both.) I took my camera and took pictures instead of taking notes. (There are a lot of pictures under the cuts, and they're pretty big, so, y'know. Dial-up unfriendly.)
I took these pictures the first evening I was there. I couldn't quite get over the completely random juxtaposition of the architecture.
Wandering through the city, I had to take this picture, because it was the closest I was getting and it was nearly September 11th.
I don't know what I can say about September 11th that hasn't already been said, I think. While in Chicago, Leigh and Meredith and I touched on the subject, talked about the new and sudden strangeness with which the world is small, and not in a good way; because we're all here online wrapped up in each others' lives, we can lose people we love to things that happen impossibly far away. And it wasn't as if 9/11 was something that could exactly pass me by, but it was made more real and human, rather than that endless piece of looped footage that stopped holding any meaning very very quickly.
I don't know, I make no sense, I am tired. I was advised to see the museum devoted to the Boston Tea Party - it would've been silly to miss out the crucial bit of history - but sadly, it has burned down. Pedar didn't believe me when I told him this, and dragged me to the waterfront anyway. I'm glad we went, because quite by accident, we stumbled onto the 9/11 memorial. This was September 10th, and the visitor book was already more than half full. I can't get across the impact of that place. It was on the water, surrounded on three sides, and it was a small cupola-type building with a lot of windows, and nothing inside but a table of candles, an American flag and a long, long, list of the names of dead people. I stared at that list for a long time, but it's impossible to do anything but read the names and think about it.
The day after this, we went to Cambridge. September 11th, 2006, and Raven strides blithely into Harvard Yard on the day of the freshers' fair. Seriously! Within twenty minutes, I'd been mistaken for a freshman about twelve times and overloaded with leaflets and free stuff, and after a while I gave up correcting people and just took what they gave me.
Cases of mistaken identity apart, I loved Harvard, too. I felt like a bit of a lemon walking about, because hey, I spend half my waking life in Oxford laughing at the tourists, but I sort of blended into the crowd of confused freshmen and took pictures.
Isn't it pretty? I was very, very jealous of the people lugging their boxes about. Not as much as I might have been, maybe. But still, jealous. I'd absolutely love to go and study there later on, but I don't know how realistic a dream this is; the two problems are a) they would take me why?, and b) my family are comfortably off, but not rich, and it would be an insane leap up from my current tuition fees. Pedar, though, is keen on the idea. He and I have made a deal of sorts; if I should ever want to go and study there, and they took me, I should go, and he would take up the offer he has to do a visiting fellowship or whatever-it-is, also at Harvard. (He is much cleverer than me. It is very depressing, exactly how much cleverer.) And we would live in Cambridge being British and subversive and buy too many books and live off noodles because neither of us could be bothered to cook and it would be awesome.
And now back to reality, yes!
Cambridge in general made me squee. It's so lovely and pretty and looks just like Oxford with a portion of the Britishness removed and replaced by green street signs. I have to admit, all my knowledge of what it looked like came from Lois Lowry's Anastasia books (they were set in Cambridge and later in Boston) and that made me squee, too.
But the huge awesome squee factor came when I saw this:
Heeee. I was very excited, and bought a book just so I could get a bag. (The book was the Oxford Pocket Latin Dictionary, which I did need, but still.) After that we went to the Harvard University bookstore, but it isn't as nice as Blackwell's. I mean, nowhere is as nice as Blackwell's in Oxford, so I bought a book anyway - On Liberty, this time - and also kept the bag.
The last thing I did in Cambridge was walk by the river, and take pictures of Boston. It was cold but very bright, a perfect sort of day, and everything looked beautiful.
And while I'm at it, random other things that I took pictures of for whatever reason:
I saw this mural painted up outside a bookshop, and instantly fell in love with it without going inside. (This was just after I had complained about the lack of independent bookshops around the place, so the timing was immaculate.)
This sticker was on the back of a street sign on Harvard Square; I laughed because it's just so random, and the sort of thing I'd only ever seen in Oxford before:
There is a subway - er, T - station called Wonderland. In Boston, you can take the train to WONDERLAND.
It is possible I found this entirely too exciting.
Also, aquariums are taking over my life.
And that was that. We were there only two or three days, and it was supposed to be a footnote to the main event. I did the Freedom Trail too, of course, but I don't want to start recounting history. (My knowledge of American history pre-1917 is pretty sketchy, at that.) But it was good, and interesting, and maybe I'll talk about it some other time. My favourite bit of that was how we managed to lose the trail in the first ten metres of it. It was embarrassing. In the process, we did discover Beacon Hill and walked past a house that was numbered 34 1/2. Really! Its address must have "Thirty-four and a half, Beacon Hill". I want a house numbered in fractions, dammit.
But I digress. I do think Boston (and Cambridge too) is now my favourite American city by a factor too high to compute, mainly because it was the only one I've seen where I thought, I could live here. This might be because it is so much like Europe, with the narrow streets and distinctive accents and palpable sense of history. It might be because the bit of Indiana I was in was hellish strip-mall suburbia. But I think it's because I was just that charmed. Wonderful place.
Urgh. Indiana. I got out of there just after Nupur's Homecoming, and it was awful. I fully appreciate that it probably didn't have the right impact on me, given that I didn't have the build-up or the cultural immersion or whatever, but, still. You know. Hundreds of people, all decked out in the same colours, and so dreadfully earnest. I'm talking only about those of Nupur's friends I met, of course. I was thinking about what would have happened at Merchants' if we'd been sat down and told that we had to spend a day cheering on a sports team. In fact, we did have those, every year - whoo, Sports Day! - and I loved it, because it was the perfect opportunity for a mass skive. And really, I was pretty well-behaved at school. Everyone skived. I can't remember a single occasion on which people were so enthused about anything. Maybe it's endearing - that Nupur and her friends care so much about their school that they plaster its logo all over their clothing and voluntarily give up their evenings to sit on uncomfortable bleachers - but for me, entirely alien.
But no more on Indiana. I went to Boston, and had a marvellous time. I loved the city with a passion - I loved the historic pretty buildings randomly mixed with glass and steel, I loved the Freedom Trail, I loved the flowers, the narrow winding streets with names and not numbers, I loved the rhythm of it, the way it was full of young people and wildly vaccilating weather, I loved it so much. (Seriously, the weather was bizarre. The first day I was there, it was thirty degrees and I was hunting out t-shirts. The second day, it was a drizzly ten degrees. The third day, it was both.) I took my camera and took pictures instead of taking notes. (There are a lot of pictures under the cuts, and they're pretty big, so, y'know. Dial-up unfriendly.)
I took these pictures the first evening I was there. I couldn't quite get over the completely random juxtaposition of the architecture.
Wandering through the city, I had to take this picture, because it was the closest I was getting and it was nearly September 11th.
I don't know what I can say about September 11th that hasn't already been said, I think. While in Chicago, Leigh and Meredith and I touched on the subject, talked about the new and sudden strangeness with which the world is small, and not in a good way; because we're all here online wrapped up in each others' lives, we can lose people we love to things that happen impossibly far away. And it wasn't as if 9/11 was something that could exactly pass me by, but it was made more real and human, rather than that endless piece of looped footage that stopped holding any meaning very very quickly.
I don't know, I make no sense, I am tired. I was advised to see the museum devoted to the Boston Tea Party - it would've been silly to miss out the crucial bit of history - but sadly, it has burned down. Pedar didn't believe me when I told him this, and dragged me to the waterfront anyway. I'm glad we went, because quite by accident, we stumbled onto the 9/11 memorial. This was September 10th, and the visitor book was already more than half full. I can't get across the impact of that place. It was on the water, surrounded on three sides, and it was a small cupola-type building with a lot of windows, and nothing inside but a table of candles, an American flag and a long, long, list of the names of dead people. I stared at that list for a long time, but it's impossible to do anything but read the names and think about it.
The day after this, we went to Cambridge. September 11th, 2006, and Raven strides blithely into Harvard Yard on the day of the freshers' fair. Seriously! Within twenty minutes, I'd been mistaken for a freshman about twelve times and overloaded with leaflets and free stuff, and after a while I gave up correcting people and just took what they gave me.
Cases of mistaken identity apart, I loved Harvard, too. I felt like a bit of a lemon walking about, because hey, I spend half my waking life in Oxford laughing at the tourists, but I sort of blended into the crowd of confused freshmen and took pictures.
Isn't it pretty? I was very, very jealous of the people lugging their boxes about. Not as much as I might have been, maybe. But still, jealous. I'd absolutely love to go and study there later on, but I don't know how realistic a dream this is; the two problems are a) they would take me why?, and b) my family are comfortably off, but not rich, and it would be an insane leap up from my current tuition fees. Pedar, though, is keen on the idea. He and I have made a deal of sorts; if I should ever want to go and study there, and they took me, I should go, and he would take up the offer he has to do a visiting fellowship or whatever-it-is, also at Harvard. (He is much cleverer than me. It is very depressing, exactly how much cleverer.) And we would live in Cambridge being British and subversive and buy too many books and live off noodles because neither of us could be bothered to cook and it would be awesome.
And now back to reality, yes!
Cambridge in general made me squee. It's so lovely and pretty and looks just like Oxford with a portion of the Britishness removed and replaced by green street signs. I have to admit, all my knowledge of what it looked like came from Lois Lowry's Anastasia books (they were set in Cambridge and later in Boston) and that made me squee, too.
But the huge awesome squee factor came when I saw this:
Heeee. I was very excited, and bought a book just so I could get a bag. (The book was the Oxford Pocket Latin Dictionary, which I did need, but still.) After that we went to the Harvard University bookstore, but it isn't as nice as Blackwell's. I mean, nowhere is as nice as Blackwell's in Oxford, so I bought a book anyway - On Liberty, this time - and also kept the bag.
The last thing I did in Cambridge was walk by the river, and take pictures of Boston. It was cold but very bright, a perfect sort of day, and everything looked beautiful.
And while I'm at it, random other things that I took pictures of for whatever reason:
I saw this mural painted up outside a bookshop, and instantly fell in love with it without going inside. (This was just after I had complained about the lack of independent bookshops around the place, so the timing was immaculate.)
This sticker was on the back of a street sign on Harvard Square; I laughed because it's just so random, and the sort of thing I'd only ever seen in Oxford before:
There is a subway - er, T - station called Wonderland. In Boston, you can take the train to WONDERLAND.
It is possible I found this entirely too exciting.
Also, aquariums are taking over my life.
And that was that. We were there only two or three days, and it was supposed to be a footnote to the main event. I did the Freedom Trail too, of course, but I don't want to start recounting history. (My knowledge of American history pre-1917 is pretty sketchy, at that.) But it was good, and interesting, and maybe I'll talk about it some other time. My favourite bit of that was how we managed to lose the trail in the first ten metres of it. It was embarrassing. In the process, we did discover Beacon Hill and walked past a house that was numbered 34 1/2. Really! Its address must have "Thirty-four and a half, Beacon Hill". I want a house numbered in fractions, dammit.
But I digress. I do think Boston (and Cambridge too) is now my favourite American city by a factor too high to compute, mainly because it was the only one I've seen where I thought, I could live here. This might be because it is so much like Europe, with the narrow streets and distinctive accents and palpable sense of history. It might be because the bit of Indiana I was in was hellish strip-mall suburbia. But I think it's because I was just that charmed. Wonderful place.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2006-09-14 06:41 pm (UTC)The pictures you took are wonderful, they catch the bizarre jumble of the city so well! :)
no subject
on 2006-09-15 11:20 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-14 06:58 pm (UTC)Were you able to take the Duck tours? Or go to the common area? I recognize some of the places you went from photos but I can't tell where you took them.
It's a shame I lived up there for two years and never got around much. I found out how easy the transportation was to use on the last day I was in Massachusetts :P
The Midwest is a little weird. People from there are simple, honest, and a bit intense. It's rather odd to watch mild mannered folk turn into raving idiots at sports events but they love their schools and they love their football.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:16 pm (UTC)In fact, I pretty much loved the whole city. Glorious place.
no subject
on 2006-09-14 07:22 pm (UTC)There was a fractional address on the street I lived on from ages 2 to 17. Someone shoehorned in another house when I was about eight, and for obvious reasons, there was no whole number for it. So, 1/2.
My high school occasionally tried to torture us with pep rallies and stuff like that. It didn't really work. (I generally tried to schedule dental appointments for those afternoons.) We had a Homecoming dance, but since we didn't have a football team, the whole thing was pretty much a joke.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-14 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-14 08:00 pm (UTC)The image of you and your father there living on noodles seems like such an Anastasia Krupnik thing, too...
I love the Raven used books...
Funny about Wonderland. There are busses that go to Wonderland here, too, and my friend Natalie lives up there. Last weekend I was out on my bicycle and I followed some trails along the river at random just to see where they went and ended up far, far on the other side of town, on Wonderland Road. By that point I was tired and I thought I could find my way home easily enough, but instead I got myself HORRIBLY LOST and wound around for hours on my bike in terrifying places like WONDERLAND and SHERWOOD FOREST. And really, it wasn't until I read your entry that I realised that being lost in Wonderland isn't horrible and traumatic (well, maybe it is) but literary and great. It was very nice to find school, and then home again. Sort of like waking up and discovering that it was all the strangest dream.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:24 pm (UTC)And much glee at your lost in Wonderland adventure! It is great and fabulous, yes!
no subject
on 2006-09-14 08:53 pm (UTC)You would like, perhaps, to click here (http://www.freshpulp.com/fishtank/fishtank.html).
(P.S. never trust me after nine at night.)
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-14 09:13 pm (UTC)There's something entirely amusing reading someone else's impressions of this place I find to be totally ordinary.
Also, the child fondiling herself in that picture of the fountain is pretty hilarious.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-16 01:20 am (UTC)And would you prefer the racist and culturally-non sequitor comments, or...or, well, that's all I have.
no subject
on 2006-09-16 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-14 10:31 pm (UTC)Also, the Wonderland T stop... weirdest place ever. It's way out in the middle of nowhere, and the name's the only cool thing about it. Heh.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:27 pm (UTC)Ahahaha. I still would go there just for the name. *g*
no subject
on 2006-09-15 03:25 am (UTC)Also, I am completely enamored of that bookshop sign. I just sat here for a minute picking out all the names and portraits.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:28 pm (UTC)Waaah. I want to go back already.
no subject
on 2006-09-15 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-16 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-15 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-09-15 06:28 pm (UTC)