#34 Boston - Are you happy now? January 27, 2005

Well, that was the question my friend Linda fired off to me on Monday morning, as apparently Miss Petra Josephine Yee in her ongoing quest for snow single-handedly caused a blizzard that dumped an insane amount of snow on the poor little state of Massachusetts. Let me tell you folks, I am loving it, but have to admit that this was the most impressive weather I have ever seen. We were forewarned, you see, that there would be some heavy snow this weekend - little did I know how this would pan out. My idea of going cross-country skiing on Saturday morning did not crystallize as there was not enough snow at that point. It started snowing more heavily in the afternoon, around 4 PM or so, just as I was taking a stroll along the Charles River Esplanade. The skies started to darken at some point, and I figured that I get my sorry little self home quickly - I did take Ella out first for a quick little trip to the store first, and so that she could have her first experience driving in snow (remember she is a California caah after all.....). There was a certain "let's prepare-for-the-nuclear-accident-that-will-happen-shortly" mentality in the store, which I did not quite understand (still don't) and opted not to participate in. What followed was amazing - I looked out the window at what I thought was a wall of fog, but it was snow, snow and snow. In addition, gale-force winds started blowing -which was an extraordinary sight, in particular along Cape Cod, where they had hurricane wind warnings. The area around Boston got up to three feet of snow - the town of Plymouth, Mass held the record with a whopping 38 inches of snow (about 1 meter), and on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, we added up to another 8 inches. It was a storm for the record books, 13,000 homes lost power, and the National Weather Service said that it was one of the largest snowstorms in the past 100 years for Cape Cod and Southeastern Massachusetts. The next snow is predicted to come next Tuesday, so I think I will be snow-happy for a while.

After the "Blizzard of 2005" (so reported by the "Extreme Team" on one of the local news channels) calmed down a bit on Sunday, Ruth and I headed into the city and let me tell you, it was unbelievably beautiful! There were no cars, people were cross country skiing the streets, snowshoeing, and the slopes of Beacon Hill had kids and adults alike zipping down the neighborhood streets and slopes on sleds, plastic saucers, tubes and toboggans (in some cases cafeteria food trays, but hey - whatever works, right?). I took lots of photos with my camera, and hope that I can even remotely capture how beautiful it was. The Boston Common and the Public Garden were beautiful, someone had graciously dug out the duckling statues (http://www.schon.com/public/ducklings-boston.php) as only Momma Duck's head was sticking out of the snow. "Make Way for Ducklings" is a Boston classic - the story of Mrs Mallard and her eight ducklings looking for a home in the big city. In 1941, Robert McCloskey wrote the famous tale which takes place in the Boston Public Garden. In honor of the story every year on Mothers' Day a parade is held where swarms of children dressed in duck outfits waddle or walk around Beacon Hill, and then get a chance to pose for a picture sitting on the mallard statues in the park. (http://www.boston-online.com/cityviews/ducklings_parade.html).

After a brief pick-me-up at Harvard Gardens which involved an undisclosed amount of Frangelico, it was time to head home to watch the AFC Championship game where our most beloved New England Patriots thrashed the Pittsburgh Steelers (sorry Jimmy!) and advanced to the SuperBowl! Yess! February 6 is SuperBowl Sunday, and plans are being made to have a very fine event at my neighbor Claire's!

Monday it was back to work (at least for me, can't say that the weather would keep me from going to work) and the final painful days of the grant application deadline. Staggering out every night as if I had been drugged, I decided to do fun stuff and totally overcompensate. I bumbled over the the main Boston Public Library at Copley Square (http://www.freefoto.com/preview.jsp?id=1211-14-2&k=The+Boston+Public+Library%2C+Boston%2C+Massachusetts) where it was free Monday night movies - this time silent movies with piano accompaniment. The story featured was "The Patchwork Girl of Oz" (http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/bk12des.htm) - written by Frank Baum, who had made a habit out of writing Oz and other fantasy stories. Watching early silent movies is always a little perplexing - everyone moves too fast as if they were doped up on amphetamines and seem to be suffering from some seizures of sort. There is no such thing as special effects, the "woozy" was apparently made from cardboard and there was some gender confusion going on as well. The piano music adds some dramatic notes, but there were few text screens in between and to be honest, I did not quite get everything that went on in this flick. Entertaining though.

Tuesday night it was back to the Museum of Science's IMAX theater for the movie "Extreme", which featured spectacular images of extreme athletes - wind surfing, rock climbing, extreme skiing and snow boarding. Spectacular and very impressive!(http://www.extreme70mmfilm.com/)

So and here we are, ready for another fun-filled weekend - Saturday morning I am heading out to Weston, where the snow shoeing event from the Boston Ski and Sports Club is finally taking place (we do have enough snow I believe). In the late afternoon, I will meet up with some friends at Frog Pond to do some ice skating and on Sunday, I am heading to Stowe, Vermont for some down hill skiing (http://www.stowe.com/). How's that for a winter weekend?

I was supposed to go out jogging tonight - don't ask - actually, yeah, do ask! The Somerville Striders, another one of the crazy running clubs around here, is featuring some event, where we would all jog in this raw weather and then afterward meet up with a famous Ethiopian marathon runner. I have not convinced myself that I will actually do it, and the thought of my gym, which features heat and TVs, is just more appealing. Don't expect much, my friends! Probably no tales of Ethiopia from this end.

With this I bid you farewell for this week. Stay warm and dry!

Love,

Petra

#33 Boston - Or is it Siberia ? January 21, 2005

My eye sockets hurt - what else is there to say! Just like eating too much ice cream and getting brain freeze - try that one on your entire head! Today we reached the absolute low point of this week (in more ways than one), 3 degrees Fahrenheit, with a windchill around minus 20 (still Fahrenheit). [For my German friends minus 20 Fahrenheit is about -28 Celsius]. Friggin' cold! Even the balaclava won't help! I have eaten entire chap sticks and the hot water bottle has come out of retirement! We are promised a load of snow sometime tomorrow, and another 4 degree day - good weather for skiing, eh? I will try to head out to Weston for some cross country skiing or snowshoeing with my friend Ruth. There is a luge event out in Wachusett which might also be interesting to see (no, I am not participating! I don't think I fit the aerodynamic requirements - still working on those cookie bumps....)

This will make up for the fact that last weekend started out snowless. Snowshoeing with the Boston Ski and Sports Club got cancelled, so after a brisk morning jogging experience I headed out to visit my friends Linda and Roger in Shrewsbury. After a little walk around the neighborhood, we headed toward West Boylston to the cinema - saw the sleeper hit "Sideways". Pretty funny actually!
Sunday was the big day - my first downhill skiing experience. I had signed on with the Boston Ski and Sports Club (http://www.bssc.com/index.cfm) for a daytrip to Mount Okemo in Ludlow, Vermont (http://www.okemo.com/winterhome/index.html). Down the hill she goes, our Petra - being the graceful person that I am, I had promised to wow the New England skiing community with a stellar performance. My efforts were definitely commendable, and I was among the top students in my two classes. Toward the end of the day I went down the bunny slope without poles and even attempted one of the green trails - I fell only once, and that was coming of the chair lift. T'was a little slippery there, and the minute I got myself vertical again, one of my class mates decided to run me over. Skiing was a wonderful experience, my shins and calves hurt, a nice hematoma has formed and previously unknown muscles have started to appear. Ironically we had to ski on artificial snow (with some lovely layers of ice underneath that made for some interesting skiing maneuvers on our part) only to drive back to Boston where the real stuff was coming down from the sky! It was a very long day - left Boston at 5:30 AM and returned around 8 PM, but so worth it!! My next skiing trip will most likely lead me to Jay Peak in Northeastern Vermont next weekend (http://www.jaypeakresort.com/).

Monday was a holiday, and my friend Elaine and I headed for a most wonderful walk at the Mount Auburn Cemetery at the intersection of Cambridge and Watertown (http://www.mountauburn.org/). It is a most marvelous spot, a beautiful old place - it was America's first landscaped cemetery. In its winter wonderland coat and display of haunting light reflections it was truly magical. But still friggin' cold, so we headed to the Hi Rise Bakery on Concord Avenue for some sugar-infused nourishment and had a nice winter tea at Elaine's home in Charlestown (http://www.charlestownonline.net/visitors.htm). Hi Rise is a great place to visit, very neighborhoodish, down-to-earth place, with a huge wooden table in the middle, where everyone gathers for coffee, hot cocoa and their phenomenally tasting baked goods.

Tuesday, the book group met at Porter's Bar near North Station - another cold night, where the whole group decided to wimp out and take the cab to the bar from my place (it is less than a ten-minute walk). Yes, yes, we caved in....
Thursday night I attended another dinner of the crazy MIT Euroclub, this time at Tommy Doyle's Irish pub near Kendall Square in Cambridge. The pub, a very cozy retreat for a nippy evening like yesterday, is a popular hangout. The owner's name is Finbar Griffin and he seems to love his regular customers - he treats 80 loyal customers to Red Sox games four times a year. The food at "Doyler's" is actually pretty impressive and the MIT Euroclub gang packed an entire section (I believe there were 25 or 30 of us). Not that I have to say it, the beer was not too shabby either.

Work is still insane, the deadline is coming up quickly and other than the fact that everyone involved is lining up to jump off one of Boston's many bridges, things are going well. Not everyone values deadlines and some folks have decided that ignoring them makes them disappear somehow.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot - I have my keys back! If you recollect, during one my more bright and physically well coordinated moments, I had dropped them down the elevator shaft in my building - I finally had them retrieved from the pit and aside from a little corrosion they are looking pretty darn ok.

So my friends in warm places, I am looking forward to the weekend, with some snowshoeing or XC skiing and with our admired New England Patriots facing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL championship game (we will cream them, Jimmy!). [http://www.patriots.com/]. Go Pats!

And remember, a duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why!

All my love,

pet:)

#32- Boston - The Week of a Thousand Years - January 13, 2005

My friends,

Greetings from Boston, where it currently rains cats and dogs and whatever else, the temperature is in the mid 60s, but the weather reports says that it could drop to 27 and snow later, so who knows? I have seen people jogging in shorts, and looking down at the Charles River Esplanade I notice a group of small lakes and river systems forming on the soccer field. Just looovely!

It has been a taxing week at work, one that I do not care to repeat, if felt like a thousand years crammed into every day, with some egregious behavior on the part of some folks that I don't even work with directly. I have a tough time dealing with unwarranted arrogance and imperviousness directed at me, and I got plenty of it this week. Relief is on the way - a nice three-day weekend with some fun plans and hopefully ample opportunity to forget about this ugly past few days. Tomorrow I signed up for snow shoeing lessons with the Boston Ski and Sports Club (out at the Weston Ski Track) and on Monday I am joining them heading up to Wildcat in New Hampshire (http://www.skiwildcat.com/) for some downhill skiing. My first lesson, this oughta be interesting. Sunday has been noted down to be a day of leisure and relaxation, and maybe a little walk around town.

Last weekend (when we still had snow), I headed out to the Weston Ski Track (http://www.ski-paddle.com/skitrack/skitrack.shtml) for my crosscountry skiing lesson with Charles River Recreation. It was the ne plus ultra of fun!! Victor, our ski instructor was at least 70 years old but in pretty snazzy shape. We learned first how to balance on our skis without poles and then continued on, eventually learning how to go up and down hills. That was my favorite bit of the day - my new friend Cheryl and I kept literally jogging up the hills with our skis and "oooooiiiiii" down we came again. Additional entertainment was provided by two extremely clumsy and bungling women in our group, who spent more time falling all over the place than actually standing up on skis. The ski track itself is great, literally 15 minutes outside of Boston (in summer it is a golf course) and while we were taking our class, it started snowing! It was just so great, winter wonderland! Eventually though the snow turned into nasty, icy rain and we headed to the little clubhouse, where my friend Arlene was already waiting with a cup of hot cocoa in her hands.

My Sunday plans got canceled, and so I improvised - I got my hands on a book called "Victorian Boston Today" that lists 12 walking tours around Boston highlighting Victorian era buildings, authors, landmarks. I decided to do the Black Heritage Trail in Beacon Hill (http://www.afroammuseum.org/trail.htm) - I never get tired of exploring Beacon Hill, and this was a particularly interesting tour. The walking tour leads you through what used to be called the North Slope of Beacon Hill - the site of the first African-American Neighborhood in Boston. Slaves were hiding in underground railroad alleys, and some very prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement lived in this part of town.
Beacon Hill never seizes to amaze and charm me - just when you think you have explored every nook and cranny, you again discover a new little gem. My new favorite spot is a little courtyard-size "park" on Temple Street across from Suffolk University. A few lovely park benches arranged in a semi-circle in a very charming setting - I can see myself sitting there in summer with a good book (and some ice cream of course!).

My friend Deborah from California was in town to see family, so I headed out toward Taunton, Mass in the late afternoon to hook up with her and her family. The drive there took me past the New England Patriots football stadium (http://www.gillettestadium.com/), which is quite an impressive site! It was a very low key and fun evening where we all crammed into her cousin's living room and watched several DVDs of "Will and Grace".

This week, I again went back to the gym, and I am happy to report that the Christmas cookie damages are slowly reversing. On Wednesday I headed to "Fajitas and Ritas" with Stephanie and her husband Dan to celebrate his new job and yesterday night I attended the Appalachian Mountain Club's Winter Soiree. A fun event, and afterward a whole pack of women who I hooked up with galumphed over to the "21st Amendment" (the pub next to the State House). Apparently our governor Mitt Romney had just given the "State of the State" address, so the place was chockful with young crisp Republicans! What an eldritch sight that was! Needless to say it was fun in there, and I think we might have convinced one young Rep to join the AMC. He probably thought that any organization that has that many women in it, can't be that bad!

Alrighty then, this is it - see my little tidbit at the end for some more Boston humor (courtesy of redsoxdiehard.com) - this time about the pronunciation (if you want to come and visit - practice, people! practice!).

pet:)

Boston English - Pronounciation

"We don't speak English. We speak whatever they brought over here from East Anglia in 1630.

The Bawstin accent is basically the broad A and the dropped R, which we add to words ending in A - pahster, Cuber, soder. For the broad A, just open your mouth and say AHHH like the docta says.

So car is cah, park is pahk. If you want to talk like the mayah, repeat after me: My ahnt takes her bahth at hahpast foah. "

#31 Boston - The Concept of Potholes - January 6, 2005

In this winter wonderland, the city of Boston has re-introduced me to something that I gladly had erased from my memory banks - you drive along and out of nowhere a hole the size of Canada opens up and you swerve around barely avoiding falling into it, car and all! My goodness! I had totally forgotten about potholes! No wonder there is always construction going on here in Boston - these craters are huge and reminiscent of the streets in good old East Germany. This also reminds me of a quote by Bill Bryson from one of my favorite books of his "The Lost Continent -Travels Across Small Town America" - "Boston's freeway system was insane. It was clearly designed by a person who spent his childhood crashing toy trains. Every few hundred yards I would find my lane vanishing beneath me and other lanes merging with it from the right or left or sometimes both. This wasn't a road system. This was mobile hysteria. Everyone looked worried. I had never seen people working so hard to keep from crashing into each other. And this was a Saturday - God knows what it must be like on a weekday."

In addition, we had about a foot of snow coming down the last two days (Petra was very happy), and we are currently in the transition phase to sleet-mush-slush-gunk kinda stuff. Last night a brave contingent of the Running Partners (the hospital's jogging group) braved the icy streets and jogged along the Esplanade narrowly avoiding some nasty spills. Boston looks beautiful with its snowy cover, and I am looking forward to a few snow activities over the course of this month. This Saturday I am taking cross country skiing lessons at the Weston Ski Track, which is just 20 minutes outside of town (http://www.ski paddle.com/skitrack/skitrack.shtml), and Sunday, I might join the AMC for some xcountry skiing in the Blue Hills area around Ponkapoag Pond. The weekend following I already signed up for Snowshoeing 101 with the Boston Ski and Sports Club (also at the Weston Ski Track) and Sunday the 16th I might join the BSCC on a trip to Okemo Ski Resort in Ludlow, Vermont (http://www.okemo.com/winterhome/index.html). There are so many cool activities, I can see myself heading out of town every weekend.

So, let's backtrack a little - as you know I returned from my Christmas vacation in Germany and arrived back here in Boston on the 30th of December. After falsely assuming folks would work on the 31st and being somewhat confused about a pretty much abandoned hospital, I headed home and got ready for the New Year's Eve festivities. As mentioned I bought myself a button for "First Night", which gives you access to six million events that are taking place all at the same time all over Boston. I relied on my friend Linda to create the perfect itinerary and that she did! Linda, Roger, Arlene and I met up early in the evening to join the parade that ambled down Boylston Street. What fun! A real parade! We then headed for the first of our events, at the Berkelee School of Music, where we (definitely) enjoyed "The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble" - their sound is described as "urban funk, mardi gras, bold street brass, with what I would describe as equally bold dress choices by its members (actually Linda and I could not quite figure out the gender of one of the performers for quite some time.... most of them wore dresses from the Dame Edna New Orleans Glitter Collection, and some feathery boas of course). Bloody great band, though! [http://fieldk.home.att.net/rse/] Definitely worth it.
We stayed for the next performance at the Berklee, which featured a group called the Family Jewels (http://jewelsrock.com/) - they describe themselves as a cool new group playing some very hot old music ("honky tonk to doo-wap, blues to jump swing, rockabilly to Chuck Berry, New Orleans Second Line to Rhythm and Blues"). Phenomenal! Very very cool indeed.
We then stomped over to the Hynes Convention Center to check out some Brazilian tunes, with Hector Cuevas and the Boston Latin Band (http://www.thebostonlatinband.com/pages/bio.html) featuring salsa, merengue, danzon, and traditional boleros and there was definitely some hot dancing going on (some also not so hot, but more in the entertaining category - there was something for everyone).
We (our little group and thousands of people we did not invite to go with us) headed toward the waterfront later at night to prepare for the fireworks that were promised to start at Midnight. Compared to last year the temperatures were pretty much tropical, and everyone was out and about. I observed a disturbing trend though - many people of what appeared to be a decent degree of intelligence were armed with plastic trumpets of varying colors that they bought of street vendors as if they were going out of style and maybe they were. I assume that their willingness to purchase these lovely instruments was directly related to the amount of alcohol consumed that night, and I wonder how many of them woke up the next morning and could not figure out why they spend eight dollars for a piece of crap like that. But there you go. The noise created was incessant and not pretty. The fireworks were great, of course, and all in all it was a very nice and enjoyable night.

The weekend following was pretty much low-key, a brunch at my boss' house out in Newton, some walks and lots of lazy time on that great couch of mine. Ella, the caah, is alive and well again, and has a new battery, and is humming along nicely (thanks goodness for warranties). Work is extremely busy for this week and next, then the grant application is in, and we will get a bit of a breather. I have been going to the gym trying to work of all the Christmas cookies I inhaled in Germany, and that's pretty much it.

I hope all of you are well -
until next week.

pet:)