Boston, day 2

So it's actually way easier to navigate around Boston on foot and via T than in cars, seeing that the one way street issue becomes moot. sunny and I didn't get lost at all today, and we did a fair amount of tramping about. Even if I grossly overestimated the walking distances of things.

So we started our journey by taking the hotel shuttle to the JFK-Umass T stop. I actually really like how Boston calls it's transportation system the T. It's actually kinda neat how every city with some sort of intracity rail system has it's own name for it - the T, the Metro, the Underground, the El, the BART, the Subway... yeah. Anyway, we took it up to Park Street, and got on the green line for a couple of stops (trolleys! squeee!) and got out at the public gardens.

(...yes, I have a crapton of crappy cell phone pics. No I'm not downloading them at this time. Laaaaaaaaaazy.)

We actually spent about an hour and a half here watching the various antics of the waterfowl and bowling the extremely fat and rather pompous male pigeons fool enough to come up to us. There really is something very satisfying to the soul about yelling "BOOGA!" at a pigeon and have it go flapping off in utter terror. But seriously, there was much with the very fat canada geese, tons of ducks (including a family of small fluffy ducklings - soooooooooo cute!) and there were, of course a couple of swans, which seemed quite fabulously annoyed by the tourists getting up in their faces with expensive cameras and snapping their picture. We didn't actually ride the Swan Boats, but it was fun watching them paddle around the pond periodically with cargos of little kids screaming at the ducks.

We then wandered up Charles Street, which is quite full of teh schiggity schiggity schway. :P Seriously, even the Sev's is unbelievably swanky. *giggle* while I'm sure Boston's cost of living is quite a bit lower than New York's, this place might be the exception. But we had fun looking in all of the little shop windows, and we managed to succesfully navigate the massive construction zone that they're doing around the Charles/MGH station and actually wander into the Mass General campus...

... Which is ginormous. O_o Seriously, it's got to be one of the biggest hospitals I've ever seen, and I've been to Kings County. What was sort of funny was that I wasn't actually sure where Bosslady's tests were happening as something went wonky with Gmail this morning, but I remembered she said something about a white building and the room number - little did I know that there actually was a White Building! Ha ha, it was a name, not a description!

So we actually beat Bosslady and D.Lo there, but they showed up after a bit and Bosslady was really glad to see us! We actually wound up staying for much of the afternoon telling the two of them stories, and I demonstrated Lego Digital Designer for them (they thought it was wicked cool). And while Bosslady was actually off having her tests, we went down to MGH's cafe for lunch. Boston's best kept secret, I tell ya. Not only is the food good, it's dirt cheap. Reminded me of a slightly swankier version of the Amherst dining common.

After that C and I turned out to be a little tireder than we expected so we cut our wanderings short, hopped back on the T and headed back to the hotel, where we napped and hung out for a bit before the Studio crew trooped back, collected us, and went to the restaurant next door for a SIGGRAPH strategy meeting. The restaurant is actually at one end of the Boston Bowling Center, which had 1/3 of it's lanes dedicated for candlepin (thought of morlock). Maybe if I have a moment one of these evenings and a little money left over I'll slip off and do a set. Maybe.

Tomorrow and Wednesday are apparently going to be hellacious temperature-wise, which makes me glad I'm not at home, because while quite all right normally, my very non-air conditioned bolthole would not be fun to be in when the temperature is supposed to cap out at 110. (that's what we heard for the valley - it's about ten degrees cooler out here by the water.) So I'm rather psyched to be spending two of the hottest days of the year in a nice air conditioned convention hall in the company of international geeks. sydneycat really needs to lay off the regular soda. I warned her hell was going to freeze over and all that extra heat was gonna have to go somewhere but did she listen? noooooooooo. ;)

In other news, jaicat apparently has been spotting God tooling around New York, and I managed to bite my tongue while sneezing today, so I'm slurring a bit cause there's a big welt on the side of my tongue. It's rather uncomfortable, though talking around it is interesting.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.