How to Have an Adventure, part 2
Here is a play-by-play of my AWESOME CRAZY spring break.
Saturday afternoon: The bus arrives in Boston an hour and a half earlier than expected because the driver, like, forgot to take rest stops to get food. Note to self: Always travel with plenty of water. The disastrous return trip was probably the universe's attempt to even out the good fortune. My cousin Judy and I hadn't seen each other since, to the best of our recollections, my sister's Bat Mitzvah in 2005. I was a little bit worried I wouldn't recognize her. But she found me at the bus station and we walked through Chinatown together to the subway (which they call the T in Boston--I'm getting such a cultural education!). I'd had no idea what was going on in her life. Apparently she'd gone back to school and gotten a master's in social work and now works for a long-term drug treatment program, which sounds like a terrifying amount of responsibility. Also--this is the crazy part--she's getting married! This blew my mind when her sister (whom I visited in New York last summer) originally told me about it. I mean, DUDE. You're my generation! We're first cousins, zero times removed. How can this be? You're acting like an OLD PERSON. But then I came to terms with it while visiting, because she has a rather grown-up lifestyle. She has a beautiful, airy apartment, the kind you intend to stay in for awhile, with a big kitchen and lots of fancy things that suggest being settled in life--a Brita filter and a block of knives and measuring cups and a fancy stereo and healthy food like non-instant oatmeal and quinoa and nutritional yeast. And she's 29. So I guess it isn't so weird. And she lives with her fiancé, Lucas, whom I was very eager to meet. My first night there, I stood around the kitchen for a bit, marveling and how grown up it was, and then we three went out to dinner at a vegetarian sushi restaurant. I've been craving sushi ever since. Usually it's not on my radar since I don't eat fish, but at this place they had sweet potato rolls and avocado rolls and plum sauce rolls and all sorts of things, and it was all delicious. Then we went back to their apartment and watched Whip It.
On Sunday, Lucas made me some tea with his fancy tea set, and then we sat around having a leisurely breakfast while reading the New York Times and attempting the cryptic crossword. I consider this the very definition of adulthood. Then, one of Judy's friends was throwing a pot-luck brunch, so we brought an apple crumble. It seemed like a really politically active group of people, and you could tell because they brought things like homemade yogurt and gluten-free muffins. Also, there was lots of plaid, which is a symptom of being a hipster, I think. I was a little bit intimidated. BUT THEN. We played Running Charades, which is where there are two teams and they each have to race through a standardized word list, and it was unspeakably fun. (See what I did there?) Except that I had the word "luxurious" and, like, what the hell? I was a little bit panicky, but afterwards everybody said I did a great job with it.
After that, Judy and I took a walk together to a historic cemetery, which there seem to be a lot of in Boston. I saw four during the five days I was there. We stopped off at a bakery and bought a popover, which is a New England delicacy or something--I'd never had one before. The cemetery we visited is the one where e. e. cummings is buried, and there's a little monument that looks like a tree trunk and there's a To Kill a Mockingbird-esque nook in the wall of it, with a book of his poetry in a ziploc bag for the public's perusal. Judy showed me her favourite cummings poem, but mine wasn't in there, so I read her my second-favourite one, instead.
That evening, I stayed in their apartment and studied while they had dinner with their wedding officiant/planner/friend. She'd given them a bunch of legal research to do, which they had put off until the last minute and which they were frantically trying to finish before they left, which was cute.
My cousin has Mondays off from work, so we used the time to go downtown to see the sights. First there was the Boston Public Library, which was on my must-see list because copperbadge says the reading room smells better than just about anywhere. Also, there was an exhibit about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. The highlight, in my opinion, was a letter in response to some young aspiring poet who'd written to introduce himself. It veritably shone with awkwardness: "Yeah! I'd love to be your friend! I mean, um. Like, if you want to be friends. Then that would be cool. Okay. *wipes palms on knees*".
We walked through the Boston Commons and the Public Gardens, and then had lunch at a very cheap, very delicious vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant where they had great imitation meat, which is hard to find in restaurants in Montreal. Judy told me all about her old job at an after-school program and how she'd made a life for herself in Boston, and we talked about books and recipes and television, and she filled up my head with things to try. We got some bubble tea for dessert, which, I learned, is not tea at all, but a smoothie with lumps of tapioca in it. I feel terribly provincial writing about my unfamiliarity with bubble tea and hipster food, but there you have it. I'm cool, really. After lunch, we did the Freedom Trail, the walking tour of historic sites recently featured on 30 Rock. This included two more cemeteries and lots of old buildings that had been turned into overpriced museums. We walked through Quincy market (pronounced with a 'z') as far as the aquarium, saw some seals that live outside as enticement to the aquatic wonderland within, realized we'd been exploring for hours and hours, and walked to the nearest subway station, which is in the basement of the Old Statehouse. The Boston massacre happened there, and now there's a guy selling peanuts and pretzels ten feet away from where Crispus Attucks was shot. That made me smile.
We stopped at the coop to buy ingredients for one of the half-dozen recipes I know: zucchini, onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, basil, oregano, and veggie ground beef, all sautéed together and eaten over spaghetti. I also suggested getting some wine, which I wanted to buy for them as a thank-you present, except I still can't buy alcohol, so I had to wait outside while Judy paid for everything, and then I tried to slip her a $20 while she protested that the wine only cost nine dollars and anyway I'm a broke college student and I should let my rich relatives cover it. In all, it was WAY less classy than I'd planned.
While we ate the dinner I cooked, Judy's fiancé told us about his job. He's an intern at a nonprofit that does a lot of community organizing, especially around education, and is trying to allocate grants for school districts around New England. That's one of the fields I've thought about working in. Both of their jobs sound so taxing and so exciting and a little bit scary. After dinner, we made peanut butter cookies, which we ate while I tried to hook Judy on How I Met Your Mother and she tried to get me into 30 Rock. I asked casually, "I've always wondered what grownups do for fun. Would you say stuff like this is a good sample?" She laughed at me a little bit, and then we got into a long discussion about what it really means to act like an adult. I told her about how I like having the There's-Nothing-Too-Crazy-for-Me attitude that's associated with youth, but at the same time, it would be cool to be able to have a normal relationship with a boy instead of the ridiculous middle-school style crushes I've been in the habit of for over a decade. She said something very wise (in true social worker fashion), reminding me that I'm always in charge of myself, and that if I act responsible and collected, people will treat me that way. She's right, of course. I do enjoy making my life into a sitcom, though. Hmm.
On Tuesday, I went exploring on my own. I had lots of things planned, but I ended up only taking the subway to Cambridge and spending my day around the Harvard campus. I felt like a spy, walking purposefully and routinely toward buildings I'd never had any business in, trying to pass for one of Them. But I totally looked the part; I even had my backpack. I wanted to have a one-day Harvard Experience and also see if it's any different from McGill. Here is what I observed:
a) The architecture is much, much prettier. There's a lot of red brick, and a bit of white granite, whereas half the buildings on the McGill campus were built during the 1970s and are ugly, hulking cubes of concrete.
b) The students, on the other hand, are exactly the same. They dress in the same black spandex pants and retro sweaters, they talk in the same slang, and they worry about midterms and unfair professors, just the same as we do.
c) There are lots of great independent shops and restaurants right outside the campus, which is not the case for McGill: you have to walk a couple blocks down to the huge malls in the skyscraper district, or over to the famous boulevard St. Laurent. This could be attributed to differences in housing. Only first-years at McGill live on campus, whereas Harvard seemed to have a lot more dorms. (Although I could be wrong-I didn't talk to anyone because I didn't want to risk blowing my cover.)
d) Non-Harvard folks aren't allowed in any of their libraries. This was disappointing. I had brought my copy of Utopia for my class in the history of political philosophy, and I wanted to sit and study in the Ivory Tower, silently surrounded by the Elite, but alas, it was not to be.
e) Cemetery #4 is right across the street from the main gates.
That night, after an extremely healthy dinner of kale, quinoa, and baked tofu and nutritional yeast, we went to a concert at the conservatory. It was, uh, it was pretty boring. I'm trying really hard to be all sophisticated and like classical music-and I do like it, really-except that this program was just WEIRD. There was a piece called Panic that seemed cool when we read the listing, but ended up being a long modernist experiment in dissonance. We also heard Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, which I was looking forward to because, hey, I've heard of Stravinsky before! That's nice and normal. But it included the spoken word, and it wasn't a very good translation, and the story itself didn't really follow an arc. I realize that everything I just typed sounds very snooty (and what I refrained from typing is even more pretentious). I guess maybe I do know something about music appreciation, after all. Anyway. I nearly fell asleep, and I was worried they would think I was boring for dragging them to this horrible concert, but Judy said she really liked the Stravinsky thing and had a great time. (Her fiancé agreed with me, very tactfully, that the other piece in the program, a viola and piano duet, had been his favourite.)
The next morning, Judy and I had some last-minute bonding time because I was leaving that afternoon. She does yoga, and she woke me up so I could participate. Note to self: Yoga is HARD. My abs couldn't handle it. Then I made Judy a mix CD full of Nellie McKay and Jonathan Coulton and the Mountain Goats and a few others. Then we hugged and said our goodbyes, and she left for work, and I packed. There were a few more things I wanted to cram in, sightseeing-wise, before I had to be at the bus station. So I headed for the Mapparium, which is a giant globe, and you walk inside of it, so it's like being at the core of the earth. It's cool because it was built in the 1930s and so it has places like Rhodesia and the USSR, and also because of all the fun acoustic properties of a ball of glass. After that tour, I had a look at the rest of the stuff in the Christian Science museum, which was rather creepy and cultish.
Judy had recommended that I wander around Newberry street to window-shop, and I tried valiantly, but it was raining pretty hard, and I just wasn't feeling it. So I bought an overpriced burrito at a hipster café, trudged back to the subway station, and said goodbye to Boston.
Now I'm back in Montreal, procrastinating like mad and scheming about what to do on my next vacation.
Saturday afternoon: The bus arrives in Boston an hour and a half earlier than expected because the driver, like, forgot to take rest stops to get food. Note to self: Always travel with plenty of water. The disastrous return trip was probably the universe's attempt to even out the good fortune. My cousin Judy and I hadn't seen each other since, to the best of our recollections, my sister's Bat Mitzvah in 2005. I was a little bit worried I wouldn't recognize her. But she found me at the bus station and we walked through Chinatown together to the subway (which they call the T in Boston--I'm getting such a cultural education!). I'd had no idea what was going on in her life. Apparently she'd gone back to school and gotten a master's in social work and now works for a long-term drug treatment program, which sounds like a terrifying amount of responsibility. Also--this is the crazy part--she's getting married! This blew my mind when her sister (whom I visited in New York last summer) originally told me about it. I mean, DUDE. You're my generation! We're first cousins, zero times removed. How can this be? You're acting like an OLD PERSON. But then I came to terms with it while visiting, because she has a rather grown-up lifestyle. She has a beautiful, airy apartment, the kind you intend to stay in for awhile, with a big kitchen and lots of fancy things that suggest being settled in life--a Brita filter and a block of knives and measuring cups and a fancy stereo and healthy food like non-instant oatmeal and quinoa and nutritional yeast. And she's 29. So I guess it isn't so weird. And she lives with her fiancé, Lucas, whom I was very eager to meet. My first night there, I stood around the kitchen for a bit, marveling and how grown up it was, and then we three went out to dinner at a vegetarian sushi restaurant. I've been craving sushi ever since. Usually it's not on my radar since I don't eat fish, but at this place they had sweet potato rolls and avocado rolls and plum sauce rolls and all sorts of things, and it was all delicious. Then we went back to their apartment and watched Whip It.
On Sunday, Lucas made me some tea with his fancy tea set, and then we sat around having a leisurely breakfast while reading the New York Times and attempting the cryptic crossword. I consider this the very definition of adulthood. Then, one of Judy's friends was throwing a pot-luck brunch, so we brought an apple crumble. It seemed like a really politically active group of people, and you could tell because they brought things like homemade yogurt and gluten-free muffins. Also, there was lots of plaid, which is a symptom of being a hipster, I think. I was a little bit intimidated. BUT THEN. We played Running Charades, which is where there are two teams and they each have to race through a standardized word list, and it was unspeakably fun. (See what I did there?) Except that I had the word "luxurious" and, like, what the hell? I was a little bit panicky, but afterwards everybody said I did a great job with it.
After that, Judy and I took a walk together to a historic cemetery, which there seem to be a lot of in Boston. I saw four during the five days I was there. We stopped off at a bakery and bought a popover, which is a New England delicacy or something--I'd never had one before. The cemetery we visited is the one where e. e. cummings is buried, and there's a little monument that looks like a tree trunk and there's a To Kill a Mockingbird-esque nook in the wall of it, with a book of his poetry in a ziploc bag for the public's perusal. Judy showed me her favourite cummings poem, but mine wasn't in there, so I read her my second-favourite one, instead.
That evening, I stayed in their apartment and studied while they had dinner with their wedding officiant/planner/friend. She'd given them a bunch of legal research to do, which they had put off until the last minute and which they were frantically trying to finish before they left, which was cute.
My cousin has Mondays off from work, so we used the time to go downtown to see the sights. First there was the Boston Public Library, which was on my must-see list because copperbadge says the reading room smells better than just about anywhere. Also, there was an exhibit about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. The highlight, in my opinion, was a letter in response to some young aspiring poet who'd written to introduce himself. It veritably shone with awkwardness: "Yeah! I'd love to be your friend! I mean, um. Like, if you want to be friends. Then that would be cool. Okay. *wipes palms on knees*".
We walked through the Boston Commons and the Public Gardens, and then had lunch at a very cheap, very delicious vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant where they had great imitation meat, which is hard to find in restaurants in Montreal. Judy told me all about her old job at an after-school program and how she'd made a life for herself in Boston, and we talked about books and recipes and television, and she filled up my head with things to try. We got some bubble tea for dessert, which, I learned, is not tea at all, but a smoothie with lumps of tapioca in it. I feel terribly provincial writing about my unfamiliarity with bubble tea and hipster food, but there you have it. I'm cool, really. After lunch, we did the Freedom Trail, the walking tour of historic sites recently featured on 30 Rock. This included two more cemeteries and lots of old buildings that had been turned into overpriced museums. We walked through Quincy market (pronounced with a 'z') as far as the aquarium, saw some seals that live outside as enticement to the aquatic wonderland within, realized we'd been exploring for hours and hours, and walked to the nearest subway station, which is in the basement of the Old Statehouse. The Boston massacre happened there, and now there's a guy selling peanuts and pretzels ten feet away from where Crispus Attucks was shot. That made me smile.
We stopped at the coop to buy ingredients for one of the half-dozen recipes I know: zucchini, onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, basil, oregano, and veggie ground beef, all sautéed together and eaten over spaghetti. I also suggested getting some wine, which I wanted to buy for them as a thank-you present, except I still can't buy alcohol, so I had to wait outside while Judy paid for everything, and then I tried to slip her a $20 while she protested that the wine only cost nine dollars and anyway I'm a broke college student and I should let my rich relatives cover it. In all, it was WAY less classy than I'd planned.
While we ate the dinner I cooked, Judy's fiancé told us about his job. He's an intern at a nonprofit that does a lot of community organizing, especially around education, and is trying to allocate grants for school districts around New England. That's one of the fields I've thought about working in. Both of their jobs sound so taxing and so exciting and a little bit scary. After dinner, we made peanut butter cookies, which we ate while I tried to hook Judy on How I Met Your Mother and she tried to get me into 30 Rock. I asked casually, "I've always wondered what grownups do for fun. Would you say stuff like this is a good sample?" She laughed at me a little bit, and then we got into a long discussion about what it really means to act like an adult. I told her about how I like having the There's-Nothing-Too-Crazy-for-Me attitude that's associated with youth, but at the same time, it would be cool to be able to have a normal relationship with a boy instead of the ridiculous middle-school style crushes I've been in the habit of for over a decade. She said something very wise (in true social worker fashion), reminding me that I'm always in charge of myself, and that if I act responsible and collected, people will treat me that way. She's right, of course. I do enjoy making my life into a sitcom, though. Hmm.
On Tuesday, I went exploring on my own. I had lots of things planned, but I ended up only taking the subway to Cambridge and spending my day around the Harvard campus. I felt like a spy, walking purposefully and routinely toward buildings I'd never had any business in, trying to pass for one of Them. But I totally looked the part; I even had my backpack. I wanted to have a one-day Harvard Experience and also see if it's any different from McGill. Here is what I observed:
a) The architecture is much, much prettier. There's a lot of red brick, and a bit of white granite, whereas half the buildings on the McGill campus were built during the 1970s and are ugly, hulking cubes of concrete.
b) The students, on the other hand, are exactly the same. They dress in the same black spandex pants and retro sweaters, they talk in the same slang, and they worry about midterms and unfair professors, just the same as we do.
c) There are lots of great independent shops and restaurants right outside the campus, which is not the case for McGill: you have to walk a couple blocks down to the huge malls in the skyscraper district, or over to the famous boulevard St. Laurent. This could be attributed to differences in housing. Only first-years at McGill live on campus, whereas Harvard seemed to have a lot more dorms. (Although I could be wrong-I didn't talk to anyone because I didn't want to risk blowing my cover.)
d) Non-Harvard folks aren't allowed in any of their libraries. This was disappointing. I had brought my copy of Utopia for my class in the history of political philosophy, and I wanted to sit and study in the Ivory Tower, silently surrounded by the Elite, but alas, it was not to be.
e) Cemetery #4 is right across the street from the main gates.
That night, after an extremely healthy dinner of kale, quinoa, and baked tofu and nutritional yeast, we went to a concert at the conservatory. It was, uh, it was pretty boring. I'm trying really hard to be all sophisticated and like classical music-and I do like it, really-except that this program was just WEIRD. There was a piece called Panic that seemed cool when we read the listing, but ended up being a long modernist experiment in dissonance. We also heard Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, which I was looking forward to because, hey, I've heard of Stravinsky before! That's nice and normal. But it included the spoken word, and it wasn't a very good translation, and the story itself didn't really follow an arc. I realize that everything I just typed sounds very snooty (and what I refrained from typing is even more pretentious). I guess maybe I do know something about music appreciation, after all. Anyway. I nearly fell asleep, and I was worried they would think I was boring for dragging them to this horrible concert, but Judy said she really liked the Stravinsky thing and had a great time. (Her fiancé agreed with me, very tactfully, that the other piece in the program, a viola and piano duet, had been his favourite.)
The next morning, Judy and I had some last-minute bonding time because I was leaving that afternoon. She does yoga, and she woke me up so I could participate. Note to self: Yoga is HARD. My abs couldn't handle it. Then I made Judy a mix CD full of Nellie McKay and Jonathan Coulton and the Mountain Goats and a few others. Then we hugged and said our goodbyes, and she left for work, and I packed. There were a few more things I wanted to cram in, sightseeing-wise, before I had to be at the bus station. So I headed for the Mapparium, which is a giant globe, and you walk inside of it, so it's like being at the core of the earth. It's cool because it was built in the 1930s and so it has places like Rhodesia and the USSR, and also because of all the fun acoustic properties of a ball of glass. After that tour, I had a look at the rest of the stuff in the Christian Science museum, which was rather creepy and cultish.
Judy had recommended that I wander around Newberry street to window-shop, and I tried valiantly, but it was raining pretty hard, and I just wasn't feeling it. So I bought an overpriced burrito at a hipster café, trudged back to the subway station, and said goodbye to Boston.
Now I'm back in Montreal, procrastinating like mad and scheming about what to do on my next vacation.