BEE #8: Boston Public Library and Boston Common in Fall

The first of this weekend's wanderings brought me and my roommate to the Boston Public Library.  The Boston Public Library was the first large and free municipal library in the United States.  There are two buildings that are a part of the central library, one dating from 1895 and the other from 1972.  My roommate and I entered the older of the two buildings and were greeted by the main staircase, guarded by two lion statues.

Main staircase at the Boston Public Library, viewed from above

The Boston Public library is full of statues and artwork by many notable artists.  The architecture is also very impressive.  I want to go back and take one of the free tours to see more of the building and learn more of the history associated with the building and its art.  Unfortunately, on this trip most of my sightseeing of the library was confined to the main staircase and Bates Hall, where we settled in to study.  I have a big midterm coming up for my Mathematical Modeling class, so studying is a major priority right now!  Of course, it didn't hurt that I had an impressive view during my four hours of studying differential equations and numerical modeling. :-)

View while studying when I wasn't staring at differential equations and calculus

On Sunday, my roommate and I took advantage of another beautiful day and went walking after church and lunch with new friends.  We walked through Boston Common and Boston Public Gardens to enjoy the fall colors which have FINALLY arrived!  Nothing like pictures with beautiful foliage!

Steeple through the Foliage

The Boston Public Garden Bridge

BEE #7: Modern Pastry and Sunday Wanderings

Last Sunday was beautiful.  The weather has been unseasonably warm for November, generally in the high 50s and low 60s.  I made plans to hang out with two of my friends from GCF, so we met up near Park Street after church.

Street performer in Boston Common

The afternoon started with going out to eat.  Then with the beautiful weather sticking around we decided to go on a walk through Boston Common and the Public Gardens.  The trees had started to change, but were not fully ablaze yet due to the long stretch of warm weather.  We stopped to watch a wedding party taking pictures and later a street performer with a crazy one-man band get-up singing a song about chocolate and talking to his plastic chicken.  You never know what you will find when exploring Boston!


After that we went to the harbor to enjoy the boats and the water. Nathan made friends with a couple of seagulls, we watched planes land and take-off at Logan airport across the harbor, enjoyed conversation, and considered taking Sunday afternoon naps along the water.

Boston Harbor with friends

Modern Pastry

Finally, we decided to walk to the North End to visit an Italian bakery.  This was a new area for me to explore!  In Boston, the North End is essentially Little Italy with loads of awesome looking Italian restaurants and bakeries.  There is an ongoing debate between whether Mike's Pastry or Modern Pastry is supreme in the North End.  I have heard people argue passionately for both sides in just my short time here.  We decided to go with Modern on this day, since Becca prefers that one.  We arrived at the bakery and found a line out the door, which I always consider a promising sign.  After all, Garrett's Popcorn in Chicago required waiting in such a line and it is superb.  We waited patiently and finally got inside, where we were greeted with a case full of tasty looking treats.  I opted for a cannoli filled with ricotta and a "Lobster's Tail" (flaky cream filled pastry) to take home for later in the week.  I was quite pleased with my choices- they were pretty yummy.  Now I'll have to try Mike's sometime so I can make my own decision on which camp to join!

My cannoli

BEE #6: Cambridge Beginnings (The Friendly Toast and the Charles)

Last weekend was less of a single adventure and more of a compilation of smaller adventures.

On Friday I had to attend my first of four Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) seminars, which are required  for all students funded by NSF grants.  Basically they are two-hour sessions that use case studies to foster conversation on ethics in research.  The topic for the first one was why fabricating data and/or lying about your results is not how research should be done.  And yes...the conclusions that you just drew and assumptions you made just from reading that last statement are the same conclusions you draw after discussing it in depth for two hours in heterogeneous small groups.  But I suppose there were good points made by some and that some people probably needed the reminder.  I was reminded not to lie about my results, learned how to use the BU shuttle to get from the main campus to the med. campus, and was rewarded with a beautiful view of the Boston skyline from the fourteenth floor of the Medical School building, so I am counting it a success.

My beautiful city as seen from BU's med campus

Saturday morning I went out for breakfast with a group of people from GCF at the Friendly Toast in Cambridge.  Not only did I realize how much I already love these people, but I found a new place that I would HIGHLY recommend for breakfast.  It gets pretty busy after 9 though, so come prepared to wait or get there early!  I had two very large toffee crumble pancakes, which I could not finish because they were just too big.  Other people at the table had everything from pumpkin pancakes to waffles with pomegranate molasses to a build-your-own omelette and everyone seemed to love what they had.

After breakfast, we had some picture-taking fun then walked from the restaurant, which is near MIT, down to the Charles in hopes of seeing the regatta that was supposed to be occurring.  While we didn't see the regatta, we did see plenty of sailboats out on the river and I got another beautiful view of the city from a different perspective. :-)

Across the Charles- a view of Boston from Cambridge

Finally, Saturday afternoon I got out of the city for a while and attended my adviser's fall party.  I got to meet his wife and adorable children and enjoyed some quality bonding time with my labmates while proving that we fail at identifying apple varieties based only on taste and that peanut butter/chocolate dessert bars should be eaten in the largest justifiable quantities. :-)

Yet another successful weekend.

BEE #5: Boston Common and Public Gardens (Late Summer/Early Fall)

This post represents a summary of my first exploration of the Boston Common and the Public Gardens.  Since both change with the seasons, I offer a first look from the perspective of late summer or early autumn.

The Gated Entrance

Boston Common and the Boston Public Gardens are adjacent park areas in the heart of Boston.  They form the northern end of what is known as the "Emerald Necklace," a string of connected green spaces and parks in the city.  Boston Common is the nation's oldest city park and encompasses about 50 acres, while the Public Gardens are spread over roughly 25 acres.  Together they contain many statues and monuments, fountains, seasonal plantings, open green space, an old cemetery, and have hosted many cultural and historical events over the years.  With so much to see and the changing seasons, these sites will require return visits- not to mention that they provide a beautiful escape from urban landscapes!

The Frog Pond

My roommate and I visited the Common to enjoy a Sunday afternoon lunch we packed with the intent of savoring a beautiful October day while on a park bench.  We sat beside the frog pond in the Common, a shallow pool sometimes used for wading in the summer and used as a skating rink during the winter.  (Perhaps a future adventure might include skating here!)  Not only did we get to enjoy lunch outside, we got to people watch as well!

Plaque on statue commemorating ether!

After lunch we walked around, enjoying the day and some of the sights the parks have to offer.  There are so many plaques, statues, and fountains to be appreciated that we couldn't possibly see them all during this trip. We did get to see some of the highlights though, such as the equestrian statue of George Washington with the Boston skyline behind it, the statue based on the children's story Make Way for Ducklings, the pond where the famous Swan Boats can be seen during the summer months (another possible adventure...), and a fascinating monument to commemorate the invention of ether for pain management.  Okay, so maybe most people wouldn't include that last one as a highlight- but me being the science nerd that I am..I loved that one!

George Washington and the Boston skyline

With everything that remains to be seen, I can almost guarantee that future adventures will occur here.

BEE #4: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)

Saturday, Sept. 24th was Smithsonian magazine's Museum Day.  Museums across the country offered two free admissions per household if you simply registered in advance and printed off your voucher.  I looked into it and found that of the participating museums in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) was on the list!  I registered and received two free tickets, one for me and one for my roommate (a $40 value for free!).

On Saturday we headed for the museum by T (the public transit system).  The museum is located off of the Green E line, so we had to transfer to get there.  Unfortunately, the station that looked like it should connect us to the correct line on the maps did not allow you to pass from the inbound to the outbound platform, which is what we needed.  So instead we ended up going up to street level and walking a couple of blocks to the next station, where we made the transfer successfully.  Turns out this was an added bonus!  We got to see another part of the city (a portion of Back Bay) that we will return to for a future adventure...

We arrived at the museum, turned in our vouchers for tickets and entered.  The MFA offers free coat-check, so we were able to get rid of our jackets before setting off to view some art.

Me in front of one of the entrances to the MFA

The MFA is BIG.  Granted my roommate and I are both "sign-readers"...so it takes us a little longer than most people to get through an area.  However, we probably only got through about a fourth of the museum in a 4-5 hour visit!  I will just have to come back in the future, but for now I'll share what I saw in my first visit.  On this trip we saw the exhibits on jewelry and musical instruments, the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, and a special exhibit of five works by Monet.

Both the jewelry and the musical instruments are housed in two small exhibits near the Huntington entrance to the museum.  The jewelry exhibit contains everything from a jewelry set that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln to a box decorated in exquisite amber cameos to a set of pieces that included taxidermy hummingbirds in their design!  Many of the pieces were either very beautiful or rather unusual and were well worth the time we spent looking at them.  The old musical instruments exhibit included a couple of pieces that stood out to me among a lot of less interesting but historically relevant instruments.  My favorite in the room was the rotating glass bowl instrument that Benjamin Franklin designed to reduce the effort necessary to produce the sound made by rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a goblet.  The intricately decorated grand piano and inlaid guitar were also some of my other favorites in the exhibit.

We then headed to the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.  This wing of the museum is new and just opened in about the last month.  It provides a home for more modern pieces of art that range from statues to neon signs to the odd and slightly weird.

"All Art has been contemporary"

The neon sign on the wall says "All art has been contemporary," which makes a good point.  I think highlights of the wing included a work made out of bottle caps and aluminum bottle labels that resembled a topographic map, a twisted hand-carved clay sculpture, a lattice-work basket made of Pyrex rods, and a piece supposed to resemble an ice flow.  For the ice flow piece the artist had traveled to the Arctic and recorded the sounds of bubbles and water moving under the ice.  She then made it into low frequency vibrations, so that when you sat on the ice flow mold, you could feel and experience being on an ice sheet!  (If you noticed...a couple of the pieces I just mentioned could be linked to science....lol.)

We got lunch at the cafeteria in the museum and ate it in an outdoor courtyard.  Then after lunch we finished the contemporary wing, walked around to explore the layout of the rest of the museum.  Here is my favorite staircase we discovered in our wanderings.

Staircase in MFA, lined with vases

Finally, we visited a special exhibit that was in its last two days at the MFA.  The special exhibit displayed five works by Monet and five by Lichtenstein all inspired by the Rouen Cathedral.  Monet painted the cathedral from five varying perspectives with different lighting.  Lichtenstein then drew inspiration from Monet's five paintings about seventy-five years later and created images of dots silk-screened over a base color to echo the outlines of the cathedral recorded by Monet.  The contrast between the classic works by Monet gathered from museums around the world (all together in one place!!) and the more modern works by Lichtenstein was very interesting and it was fun to see how the same subject could lead to very different pieces of work!

There is still a lot left to explore.  Besides our wandering to get the layout of the museum, we did not get a chance to explore the Art of the Americas, the European Art, the Ancient Art or the Asian Art wings.  I guess there is always next time! :-)

After we finished at the museum, we took a detour on our way home for a repeat trip to Haymarket (BEE #1).  Nothing beats four nectarines or a bag of lemons for a buck!

BEE #2&3: Fenway Perspectives

More of the quintessential landmarks in Boston are Fenway Park and The Green Monster.  I knew that I wanted to visit Fenway at some point in my five year stay in Boston and that my brothers have big dreams of coming to visit me so they can visit Fenway...but I didn't exactly expect to be attending not one, but TWO Red Sox games in my second full week at school!  With two games under my belt, I have now experienced Fenway from different perspectives...and I think I might need a Red Sox hat for Christmas if game attendance is going to continue in the future!

Game #1:

Field view from outfield bleachers

My first trip to Fenway involved four tickets that one of my fellow grad. students had to the Wed. Sept. 14th game against the Toronto Blue Jays.  The plan was for myself, my adviser, the new lab manager, and one of my adviser's other students to attend the game after work on Wednesday.  Of course, what they thought was a night game turned out to be a day game!  After much discussion, we decided that playing hooky (shhhh don't tell!) was acceptable to attend the Sox game...as long as we all went back to work after the game and made up for the time missed by working in the evening!  We had seats in the outfield bleachers and it's from there that I got my first look at the Green Monster.

The Green Monster from the outfield bleachers

For those of you unfamiliar with baseball and Fenway Park, the Green Monster is the tall, green wall in left field.  When Fenway was built, the city road on the other side of the wall prevented them from building out, so instead they just built up!  The wall also houses the scoreboard, which is changed manually from inside as well as updates on other games happening around the country, which are manually changed by a worker who exits the wall through a door onto the field between innings.

In my first game I saw my first major league home run, ate an Italian sausage with onions and peppers (which I'm told is a staple), and began to learn the names of some of the Red Sox players.  Unfortunately...I didn't get to experience my first Red Sox win- they lost 4-5.  (Just to set the record straight- we did go back to work afterwards and I spent my evening training in the mineral separation lab..yay!)

Game #2:
My second Red Sox game came on Sat. Sept. 17.  Since I am in a new city, making friends and finding people to connect with has been a priority.  Therefore, I decided to attend an event for BU's Graduate Christian Fellowship group which meant...Red Sox Game #2!

Instead of having tickets already in hand, this time I experienced the "Game Day" ticket sales process.  We met up as a group at BU around one then walked over to Fenway, where we joined a long line of people hoping to purchase tickets for the 4:00PM game.  The Red Sox games have sold out for the last couple of years, so you have to get there early for any hope of getting a seat!  We waited in line for a couple hours talking and getting to know one another until they opened the ticket sales window.  When we got up to the front our choices were $90 seats or $20 standing room only tickets...we're poor grad. students....so I'm pretty sure you can guess what we went with!  After we got our tickets we went straight into the stadium and sat down for a while in someone else's seats to rest up for potentially standing through the game!  This gave me a new perspective on the stadium that I'm sure I could never otherwise afford (note the padded seats...).

View from the padded seats in left field

Once the people came to claim their seats, we got bounced and stood in designated standing room for a while, until we eventually got to sit in different unoccupied seats.  Turns out we landed in a season ticket holder area, where people had chosen not to use their seats that day.  This gave me yet another view of the field, which frankly was my favorite because it provided a good view of the players up to bat:

View from left field bleachers

We had a lot of fun teaching the international students who were with us how the game of baseball works.  We also participated in the time-honored traditions of the seventh inning stretch and the eighth inning singing of Sweet Caroline (which evidently no one really knows the origin of).  A good time was had by all, even down to the Cracker Jacks!

The one downside is that I still haven't seen the Red Sox win!  They lost to the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday 3-4 in a bit of a nail-biter.  I guess there's always next time....

Boston Exploration Excursion (BEE) #1: Haymarket

This is the first post of what I hope will be an ongoing, intermittent series.  While I'm here in Boston for a while (probably five years!) I am hoping to have opportunities to explore some of the local sights, culture, restaurants, etc.  BEE posts will give you the opportunity to explore Boston with me from afar!

BEE#1:  Haymarket, Quincy Market, and Boston Harbor

My roommate, one of her friends who came into the city for a visit, and I decided to check out the discount produce market known as Haymarket, which takes place on Fridays and Saturdays year round.  According to a local tourism website about Haymarket, people have gathered here since about 1830 to buy and sell produce!  It resembles a farmer's market with tents and handcarts full of produce and lots of people jostling around to purchase fruits and vegetables.  

Haymarket Produce Stands

Vendor at Haymarket

However, there is one big difference.  The produce for sale is stock cleared out of warehouse stores across the river to make room for new shipments, so it is ripe and needs to be used or frozen quickly but is also sold at incredible prices.  As we walked around we saw everything from garlic to oranges, onions to cantaloupe, carrots to mangoes, and much much more.  To give you an idea of the prices, I got two pounds of white mushrooms for $3 and three small plastic containers of red raspberries for a total of $2.  My roommate got 8 pluots for a buck or two and a large eggplant for $1.  You have to do a bit of picking to avoid overripe produce...but it's well worth it!  We're going to have fresh mushroom pizza tonight, and I froze half a quart of red raspberries.  Another cool thing was one of the vendors let us try an Asian fruit called longan.  It has a tough covering, but once you peel off the covering it looks like the inside of a grape with a pit!  We all thought it was pretty good.

After we were done at the market, we walked over to Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, which are nearby.  This is one area where I will return to explore more later, but this time we stuck with Quincy Market.  Quincy Market opened in 1826 and more information about it's history and the surrounding area is available here.  

View outside Quincy Market (The crowd is watching a street performer.)

Quincy Market is a long building with two wings lined with food vendors selling basically every type of cuisine imaginable.  For dinner, I ate veggie Mac n' Cheese from one of the vendors.  It had onions, mushrooms, peppers, broccoli, and cherry tomatoes and was delicious!  The center of the building is two levels filled with public seating.  We sat upstairs to eat and enjoyed people watching as well.

Inside Quincy Market, looking down from upstairs seating area

Boston Marina

 Finally before heading back to our apartment via the T (public transit system), we walked out to see the water.  I have never lived near the ocean, so being within an hour of a beach and the ocean is superbly exciting!  We walked through Christopher Columbus Park where an arts festival was going on to a marina on Boston Harbor.  The view was beautiful, and you could also see planes coming in over the water to land at Logan International Airport across the harbor.  Here is a look at the view:

Boston Harbor (plus large plane landing at Boston Logan!)

More adventures to come in the future!