Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Boston under the snow


Hello everyone,
I am now in Boston writing to you from the library and it is snowing!!! What a difference from Thousand Oaks!! And since all my winter clothes are in storage in London, I just had to go shopping for a coat and gloves!!!... I was dreaming of lovely spring weather in New England! I was told there was a cherry blossom festival in Washington that week-end. Not really! Today it is snowing and the weather forecast for the rest of the week is not very optimistic! I was not very prepared for that and a bit too optmistic while packing... Boston is like London in some ways. Stephen tells me the accent is a bit similar. People are less talkative than in California, something to do with the weather I suppose. Of course we had sea food at Legal Sea Foods, saw the 200 year old battleship USS Constutition, walked the Freedom Trail, and were amazed ... We followed in the footsteps of those who started the Independence of America with the Boston Tea Party, with Paul Revere's cartoons, and important speeches at the start of the abolition of slavery. Believe me, we walked the freedom trail extremely quickly and with lots of tea breaks in warm places and stops in various bookshops to survive the cold. On my own, I discovered the town center, China Town and loved Beacon Hill, with wonderful 18th Century architecture, very smart Back Bay, and fell for the Museum of Fine Arts , which owns a wonderful collection of art, including van Gogh and the French impressionists. Boston is also the home of the Kennedy familly and of Malcolm X. The Italian quarter, the North End, is so great with the best Italian bakeries and people with that air of "they know it all" and you are just a tourist...
I met up with Emily and we are spending the day together. It is so great to meet up again. The last time was in London. She lives on the East Coast so she drove here. Instead of freezing on our way to the Arts Museum, we went shopping in a great second hand clothes shop on Newbury Street, Second Time Around where we found some good bargains. In London, we used to go to charity shops and our best day is when Emily bought these leather trousers for £10 and later found £10 in one of its pockets! In the evening we are going out with her sister Liz, who lives in Boston, in a restaurant in South End. Liz works for the Big Sisters/ Big Brothers of America, which is a great project. I am very impressed by it; I have heard about this mentoring scheme from different people. It should be adapted it in London.
We are fairly jetlagged, three hours this time, and Stephen has to work at Amgen, Boston, near MIT, Massachussets Instiute of Technology, one of these places in the world where grey matter abounds: sixty-three Nobel Prize winners!
Boston is sooo different from California!!! There is a SUBWAY and there are BUSES, the town centre is quite small and very WALKABLE! How lovely and civilised!
We are staying at th Marriot, Kendal in Cambridge, Massachussets, just on the other side of the river, two stops away from the center of Boston, and it is only twenty minutes walk from Harvard. It is strangely familiar for Stephen and I to be in another university town and the atmosphere is similar to the other Cambridge. So this is part of the Ivy League and one of the centres of intellectual life in the USA. Great architecture, with a mixture of colonial influence and grandiose university buildings.
As we travel, we have to tip everyone and Emily told me I was stingy...How do you work out who to tip and how much? Oh, dear, I forgot that poor taxi driver on the first day. But it is not easy to carry luggage, keep an eye on everything, and rummage through my bag with gloves on, while working out what 15 to 20% of the fare might be...

I will be returning to Thousand Oaks with lots of ideas and good resolutions.

About Me

Fille du Midi et exilée volontaire au Royaume-Uni par amour et esprit d'aventure depuis 1993/97... Nîmes, Djedda, Avignon, Cambridge, Londres et Los Angeles!