Off the record - Craig Box

Sara had left for a wedding, so I was on my own in Boston for the weekend. Boston was at the heart of the American Revolution: the massacre, the Tea Party (not the Canadian band), the Port Act and the Siege Of are all Wikipedia articles that have the word "Boston" in the title, and thus are probably somewhat related. As a citizen of the Rest Of The World, we only received moderate instruction in American history between school and Sesame Street, so I had to figure it out on the tour.

Unfortunately I had the tour guided by the little old lady who didn't remember much, rather than the tour by the guy in the period costume.

My Freedom Trail tour took me from Faneuil Hall, past the Old State House: from the balcony of which the Declaration of Independence was read, and the first seat of government in the New World. We went to the birthplace of Ben Franklin (inventor of the kite, or the $100 note, or something), the location of the first school in Boston, King's Church, a beautiful Old City Hall, and a butt-ugly New City Hall.

Afterwards, a British street theatre duo twisted themselves into shapes for my amusement, but couldn't really outdo the Edinburgh folk. Plus, his assistant was his 'sister', which seemed just a little too incestuous given some of his banter. They did, however, balance on top of one another on a big rubber ball, so mad props to them. Some other street theatre I caught the end of later seemed to involve 20 mins of set-up for a guy to jump over another guy. He wasn't worth a dead president.

Lunch was very Bostonian: Clam Chowder served in a hollowed-out bun, accompanied by Incan song.

For the afternoon, I'd downloaded a podcast with a guided walk around the Boston Harbour. This is the inner harbour, and they have lots of water taxis out to the Harbour Islands National Park, and other interesting places such as the airport, which is right on the waterfront. There are a lot of seafood stores and restaurants waterfront, as well as some interesting sculpture.

I love this building. It's the Moakley Federal Courthouse. My brother wanted me to go see where Boston Legal was filmed: unfortunately, the answer is 'California'.

I wanted to take some sort of boat excursion to end the day, and walking back from the end of the trip I passed an old schooner that I'd walked past earlier (where I took a photo of some passers-by for them, and they asked me when I was going back to England.) It sounded like fun, so I spent two hours out on the Roseway, a vessel owned by the World Ocean School, which does things like provide team-building exercises to underprivileged kids.

We passed right under the path to the runway of Logan International Airport, saw Fort Warren, the US Naval ship Sisler, and avoided being run into by oncoming bigger boats.

Overall, a fun day out, and my last day in Boston.

I work with Linux a lot, and the mascot is a penguin. So, here's a picture of a penguin taking a dump.

This, and other assorted pictures of fish, was taken at the New England Aquarium, on the Boston harbour. It's a great building, built around a 750,000-litre tank, simulating a Caribbean ocean reef.

They have:

• psychadelic jellyfish
• carefully indexed penguins
• Ugly Moray eels
• a highly territorial (and lazy) fish, that always hangs out in the same spot
• a giant sea turtle, who has been there since the opening in 1969
• hand fed fish
• angry sharks
• amazing displays of colour
• fish that can Not Be Seen
• fish being schooled
• a sharp-toothed piranha, that had a chunk taken out of by another sharp-toothed piranha
• SNAKE, SNAKE, IT'S A SNAKE!
• things you could touch (I can haz starfish?; Sara has crabs)

Out the back were three fur seals, which are always fun to see being trained and fed. Here's some feel-good video:

Two stops down from Harvard Square on the Red Line is Kendall Square, around which can be found MIT. MIT wasn't born here - it was originally founded in Boston in 1865, across the river from Cambridge (if you remember my little geography lesson) and originally known as Boston Tech. It moved to its current location in 1916, and as far as I know, has settled down and is planning to retire in its current location.

MIT is famous for:

• its Infinite Corridor, which defies photography with its infinite-ness
• the Great Dome
• Hacks, pranks pulled by students, including assembling a replica police car on top of the Great Dome
• the Stata Center (interior), which is crazy madness
• Richard Stallman, who was not mentioned on the tour or openly celebrated anywhere we were

This little baby is the Stata Center. It was designed by Frank Gehry, famous for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, who appears to be afraid of 90 degree angles. It's named for some rich dude who went to MIT and donated the money for its construction.

Down the road a little is the MIT Museum. They're renovating this at the moment, which is good, because it's pretty well hidden where it is. It's also a little out of date - for an institute who is leading the world with research, they look like they don't really want to give the museum their hand-me-downs for 10 years. This is Kismet. I think he mates with gerbil to produce Furbies.

They have some really cool holograms (although Jem was nowhere to be seen).

One of the coolest things at the museum is the artwork by one-time Artist in Residence, Arthur Ganson. He builds Rube Goldberg-esque kinetic sculptures that exist to do not very much at all. I like this one in particular.

Check out my other videos for a few more.

I went on a Contiki trip around Europe a couple of years ago, and met some cool people. I put a call out to some who were close to Toronto and ended up with an offer to stay in Boston with a friend named Sara. Here's an out-of-context picture of her on the Metro in Munich.

Sara lives in Somerville, which is actually two cities over from Boston, but part of the "greater" metropolitan area. She works at MIT, which is in Cambridge (named for the city where this travel started a month prior), and goes to university in Boston.

Confused yet? Here's a picture. Pictures relieve boredom.

The MBTA, locally known as the T, is much older and less tended to than the Underground I rode on to the airport I departed from earlier in that day. It doesn't go all the way to the airport, the cars are wide and creaky, and it looks like they stopped upgrading anything in 1984. But, it gets you where you need to go - I was staying a few blocks from Davis station. Buses ran semi-regularly but the walk was pleasant enough.

(I think I'm danger of becoming a metrophile.)

I had the usual "look the wrong way crossing the road" problem, and couldn't figure out this crazy 'fahrenheit' system. I'd adjusted to miles per hour though, having driven around England for a month; can't estimate distance in them though. (I grew up taught only metric, yet describe myself as 6 foot tall. Go figure...)

Tourists should do the "Unofficial" Hahvahd University tour, more popular than the official one by several orders of magnitude, and now, strangely, enough, official. Go figure again. It's a great insight into the oldest university in the US, and, erm, "most well endowed" in the world. In case you're wondering about the spelling, it's how they pronounce their Rs in Boston.

They're proud of how old their institute is - founded in 1636, it's older than the Declaration of Independence (1776), for example - but they don't really have a global perspective, being that their city is named after the home of the second oldest university in the English-speaking world, founded in 1209.

Boston is also very famous for its role in the foundation of America, of course, which we'll get to in a later post.

They play up the rivalry between the City of Cambridge and the University: the gatehouse building on the right, due to taxes, was the most expensive building, per square foot, on campus.

Cambridge wanted to build a fire station near the campus, but the university only agreed to give them the land on the condition their firehouse was built in the style of a Harvard building. This almost doubled the cost, and came back to bite them when Memorial Hall caught fire in 1956. Cambridge FD claimed they couldn't respond in less than 30 mins - to a building 100m away - because they hadn't been able to afford a tall enough ladder, due to the inflated cost of the building, and thus had to wait till the building burned short enough.

Unfortunately style changes over time, and in the 1970's they built this eyesore.

The tour guides are paid only in tips, but I thought the $20 suggestion was a bit steep, compared to other walking tours I'd been on.

(skipping forward a few days again)

Recorded a television program on a video cassette recorder.  I can't remember the last time I did this.  Either I had an aborted attempt at a MythTV setup, or I watched the Torrent Channel when I 'missed' something.

But seeing as Canada can receive US TV signals, they rebroadcast all the good shows here, and S3E1 of Prison Break was on while I was out last night...

Meh, Jesus has probably seen it already.

Why do people all have identical black fabric suitcases?  It's an invitation to have everyone else who has one to pull it up, check it, and then dump it violently back on the carousel.

I went to some effort to get my new suitcase.  Two weeks before I left, I found a really nice polycarbonate Delsey suitcase at Dressmart in Te Rapa, but they only had them in pink.  They said they were getting more in.  They didn't.  They said they had other branches in Auckland and Christchurch - both places I was going to be within the week - but they didn't know where they were.  They called them to ask but never got an answer.

Tried lots of other leads, to no avail. It looked like pink or nothing, until I found exactly what I wanted - in a little non-franchised suitcase store I found while walking down George Street in Dunedin with MY MUM.  Turns out I had to go about as far south as I could before I could get my travelling companion for the north.