For our first full day in Boston, Geries and I split up in the morning, and I took a bike ride into town. The ride into the city was surprisingly easy with just one turn onto the bike friendly Commonwealth Avenue that I took all the way into town. After making a quick stop at Best Buy to pick up a CD, I made my way across the Charles river toward Cambridge and the renowned Harvard Square. From the bridge I got a nice view of downtown Boston in the distance. Though its close buildings seemed small compared to the colossal skyscrapers of Chicago, it was a pleasant mixture of old and new that summarized the rich history of the city.
A short ride from the bridge brought me to Harvard Square and its namesake school. I parked my bike and took a walk around the beautiful campus for a little while. Traditional brick faced buildings looked over well manicured lawns criss-crossed by paths bustling with tourists and students alike. I carved out some space in the grass on one of the many multicolored chairs and benches that were strewn about the courtyard until some unexpected showers drenched the area. Once the rain let up for a bit I continued walking around and found the infamous statue of John Harvard as well as a really interesting building with distinctive patterned shingles and a tower rimmed in busts of famous thinkers sternly looking down on passerby.
By this time I was getting fairly hungry, so I ducked out of the Harvard campus onto the streets of Cambridge to find Mr. Bartley's Burgers, which was suggested by our host. Before long I came upon the cramped restaurant sitting next to the Harvard Book Store, and managed to squeeze into the building before the sky opened up again. Inside was a whirlwind of activity, with patrons noisily chatting in every corner while servers literally shouted orders to the cooks. Every inch of wall space up to the high ceiling was plastered with pictures and posters and small strips of paper proclaiming things like "Al Pacino sat here." The menu was equally eclectic, boasting burgers named after celebrities and politicians. I ordered an Oprah Winfrey (probably so named because it could feed an African village), an excellent burger slathered in barbecue sauce and onions with a side of baked beans.
After lunch I browsed around the Harvard Book Store and some of the other shops in the Harvard Square area until I met back up with Geries. Next we headed a little southeast to check out MIT, which was as different from Harvard as you could imagine. All of the clean, modern buildings were simply numbered, as opposed to all of the halls named after rich dead guys just a few miles away at Harvard. It was already fairly late, so we didn't spend too much time before heading over another bridge and back into downtown Boston.
Once back in the city, we came upon the Public Garden and the Boston Common, a pair of scenic parks in the heart of the city. We spent some time wandering around the parks until we were ready to grab some dinner. After consulting the web, we found a nice sushi place in Chinatown where we had some great sushi before heading back to our host's place. A wrong turn delayed us for a few minutes, but we made it back without too much trouble.
When we arrived, our host Megan was around and offered to teach us a new card game called Nerts. It was a fast and furious combination of solitaire and speed that kept us occupied for a while before we watched some True Blood with Megan's roommate Andrea and Andrea's boyfriend Charlie. It was cool that we got to hang out with our host a bit even though it was a weeknight and she had work the next day. From there we got to bed to rest up for another day in the city.
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