Boston, Mass

At the end of May, Jose and I bought 2 tickets to this Saturday’s Red Sox game. This, of course, necessitated actually going to Boston, so voila! We bought plane tickets a few weeks ago and here we are! Just a random, awesome vacation in Boston. Jose went to college here and this is the first time he’s been back since graduation. He wants to move back here. The bad thing is that I want to move here too.
Yesterday we left Houston at the ungodly time of 6:45 a.m. which meant getting up at 4:00. Despite getting about 4 hours of sleep, we made the most of our afternoon here. We checked into the Hotel @ MIT, which is just a fabulously nerdy as it sounds. There are equations on the blanket on the bed, old photos of MIT on the wall, the lights look like circuit boards, and there’s a atom on the carpet in the elevator. There are robots in the lobby, and giant prints of MIT patent applications on the wall behind the check-in desk.
We walked around the MIT campus yesterday as Jose talked and talked about his memories of college. “I must be boring you,” he said. But he wasn’t. I liked hearing all his college stories. I know I’ll talk his ear off with the same thing whenever we visit Atlanta together.

We stopped at the MIT bookstore so he could finally embrace his alma mater with a sticker for his car and a few other things. They had ads up all over the place for the Harry Potter release tomorrow, so I went ahead and reserved a copy of the book at the MIT bookstore. I can start reading it on the plane home on Sunday.
Last night we met up with his friend Seth and Seth’s friend Sarah and had sushi and then went to hear a musician described by Seth as an “extreme cellist.” Sounds a little sketchy, right? But the guy, Erik Friedlander, was actually amazing. He sometimes played the cello normally, and sometimes played it rather like a guitar. It was pretty amazing that he was making all those sounds and all that cool music with a single instrument. Definitely worthwhile. Even crazier was that the concert was just being held in some little gallery in Cambridge. One room, a bunch of folding chairs, on some random street. This is the kind of stuff that just doesn’t happen in Houston.
We crashed by 11:00, exhausted from the lack of sleep the night before. This morning we went on a run-slash-walk from the hotel, across the Charles River, along the Boston side, back across the Longfellow Bridge, and back to the hotel. It was almost 4 miles, and Jose has not run in quite a while, so after a few miles of run-walking, we pretty much walked the entire last bit. It took us over an hour, so I hesitate to count it as a run, but it was still good exercise. I hope to get in a solid 4-5 mile run on Saturday. This city is a great city for running.