Archive for July, 2006

I continue to experience great internet connectivity in Boston from our fancy hotel room so this is a wonderful opportunity to post more of my travel journal *while* its happening! So here it is, my second full day of adventures while in Boston!

After my post yesterday, I napped for a short while and then managed to get a hold of Mike to organize heading out for dinner. As far as I knew it was just the two of us. We browsed some restaurants for awhile on google local curious what sorts of restaurants were around us. We found a few, but we really weren’t sure where we should go and the information we got was a little self-conflicting. So we decided to wander and find a place on our wanderings.

When we got down to the lobby to leave a key for Nolan and Mike (the other one – this will be confusing I can see) after their fancy UAI banquet. Lo and behold, we find a group of UofA people just figuring out *their* dinner options. Naturally, we joined the fray and ended up at a restaurant called “Seaport” which I believe has no relation to the seaport hotel which we are staying at. I had a dish called the Regatta which was a three sea food dish including the biggest scallops I have ever seen, some king crab, and probably the best shrimp I have ever tasted. If you know me, I never really got excited about shrimp before because … well I just never really thought it tasted like anything special. This shrimp, however, was *amazing*!

After dinner, we decided to wander around night-time Boston for awhile so we wandered around downtown for a couple hours. We found a place called the Quincy Market which was pretty alive with people even at 10:00pm. The Quincy Market itself was a long building teeming with fast food restaurants, candy stores, cookie places, and ice cream stalls. It’s sort of setup like HUB mall – a big long narrow building with lots of shops along the sides but nowhere really to sit down.

After wandering down there with several people buying cookies and ice cream for myself, we left and then stopped at a little bar for a drink before returning to the hotel to crash. I had been up for almost a solid 2-day period with the 2 hours of attempted sleep on the plane between Edmonton and Toronto.

The next morning, Nolan and Mike had commitments at the conference – Nolan had a volunteer shift and Mike had decided to attend a workshop. I needed sleeping time so I tried to sleep in a bit which half-worked. I probably got about 6 hours and then another hour and a half after they left. It would have to do!

Once I got up, I putzed around until 11:00 when I had arranged to meet up with Maria, Mike and Brad to go exploring in Boston for the day. We hopped on a the silver line bus (the transit here is colour-coded for the various main sections of the city – so there’s the blue, green, red, orange and silver lines to choose from) which took us to an interchange where we could catch a the red-line train. Our destination? MIT.

MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a very well known campus that is for sure. The first order of business though was not to check out the campus but to find food since most of us hadn’t eaten yet. It took us a long time – many restaurants seemed to be closed on Sunday! Finally we found a little place where we were treated to a pretty affordable but tasty lunch.

After lunch we finally started to explore the MIT area with interest. The first place we found was the MIT museum which we decided to check out. Fortunately for us, it was not only open, it was free admission day! Apparently the 3rd Sunday of every month is free admission day, and we had coincidentally come at the right time … sweet deal!

It took us awhile to go through the museum. They had some fascinating displays, including a really cool hologram room, some sculptures/devices which were amazing engineering demos, and some pieces of computer history including the first hardware LISP implementation. All in all, it was a pretty good use of some time in the day!

Back outside, the weather had cranked it up a notch. It had started out hot, but it was getting quite a bit hotter – breaking 34 or 35 degrees I am sure. For us Alberta dwellers, the humidity is a lot more difficult to get used to than I figured it would. It kind of swallows you up and makes it a little tougher to move, breathe, and all that. Its not major – just something different to experience.

Despite that, we wandered around MIT for awhile. Nothing was really open that we could tell, but we got a chance to check out the main building with the dome that I hear engineers have used as the source of many pranks. After a few pictures we started walking in the general direction of Harvard to check out the other famous campus in Boston. It took us quite awhile to walk there, especially in the heat. We stopped at a place not too far away from campus that was advertising air conditioning and cold drinks. Sign me up!

After a couple drinks we walked the rest of the way to the Harvard campus. We were pretty tired, but the campus was beautiful. We wandered for awhile and then we felt the hotel calle us back so we finally hopped back on the redline back to the hotel.

I’m gonna have to continue the story later – everyone’s starting to arrive. I think we’re playing poker for a little while before bed. Yay!

Heraldk