Check this out: those ribbon car magnets


Allston, Massachusetts is known as the college ghetto of Boston; it's just on the other side of the Charles river from Harvard University, which is just down Massachusetts Avenue from the Georgia Tech of the North, which is also on the T red line that took Kristy and I to see the Boston Pops Fourth of July Spectacular last night.

In the fourteen hours we spent traipsing through downtown Beantown (origin of that nickname, anyone?), we took a for-purchase walking tour for free (accidentally, of course), had communist propoganda shoved in our hands, and followed almost half of the Freedom Trail. I reveled at being in the center of the liberal intellectual elite, a bastion of democratic idealists who support things like MoveOn.org, Sam Adams, and John Kerry. I say this partially in jest, though, since the party mindset of Democrats is just as bad as the blind adherence to party rules by the Republicans. I won't deny that I felt more at home, politically, here; I am, afterall, an unabashed supporter of global multilateralism and free thought.

Did I mention one of the points of interest on our walking tour was John Kerry's house? I took a picture. Ben, our tour guide, told us he went trick-or-treating to the Kerrys' and they gave out really big candy bars -- I wanted to ask if they gave out ketchup packets, but I didn't and instead just laughed to myself at my oh-so-adult sense of humor.

Besides lots of walking, we also celebrated the birth of the nation with lunch in a Cheers-replica restaurant, where we had a fitting Fourth lunch -- Sam Adams Summer Ale, New England clam chowder and a fried cod sandwich (for me), all while wearing red, white, and blue. Around 5:30 we made our way back to the "hatch" oval to stake out some seats for the outdoor performance. We ended up sitting in front of a family from Rome, Georgia, which made the pre-concert sound like we were waiting for a show at Stone Mountain because of their loud accents. The show was worth the wait - it was magical to be surrounded by 400,000 people listening to patriotic songs - and the fireworks were crazy crazy amazing. I wasn't swelling with a particular sense of patriotism from the whole thing (I think I've appreciated America more when I've been abroad for this particular day) but it was neat to be in the place that started it all, and I enjoyed the showmanship of it all.

I'm going to rewind just a little, because Kristy took me to work last Friday (she co-ops at a well known sound company), and it was so cool. That's really all I can say about it, since she's in R&D and proprietary stuff and all that .... but from work we made the three hour drive to her hometown of Kingston, NY, where we spent the weekend hiking at the Mohonk Preserve and kayaking on the Roundout Creek off the Hudson River. Both, very fun. Her mom's cooking, even better. :)

I posted pictures from this weekend to Flickr. So now I'm trying to get motivated to go to the New England Aquarium and finish the rest of the Freedom Trail we didn't get to yesterday. And tonight - we're karaoking. Hurry! The British are coming!