ASNN

change of plans

[Events and thoughts from Sept. 20]
For various reasons (not the least of which was that I was exhausted), I decided to skip the Philly game. Instead, I drove straight from Baltimore to Steve Schultze's place in Boston. That would give me an extra day of not having to pay for a hotel, not having to drive (since I skip the middle step of Philly), and not having a fast internet connection. :-)

So Baltimore to Boston, not a bad drive, right? Should just a few miles, right? Well, thank you Yahoo! Maps for choosing to send me directly through the center of NY City. Maybe it wouldn't be bad... oops, it was apparently rush hour and there was a LOT of construction going on. Fifty minutes on the George Washington Bridge, an hour-and-a-half to go about 10 miles on I-90, and I finally got out of there. I swore that I would never do New York again. Aside from the time, it was dirty, hot, concrete everywhere, etc. Ugh.

Got to Steve's okay though. After figuring out the parking situation, I went upstairs to crash for a bit and meet his roommates. Only Nathan and Rob were in, but they seemed to be pretty much par for the course, given where we were (i.e., in Cambridge, mere minutes from the legendary MIT). Rob is a grad student working in the MIT Media Lab playing with music "stuff". Nathan programs embedded OSes based on NetBSD. I was among friends (though, admittedly outclassed).

The four of us went out to a Spanish Tapas restaurant that evening and had a wonderful dinner, which was just what I needed. Sitting, talking about relevant issues of the day, eating great food (I had a chile /relleno/ with shrimp and goat cheese and drizzled with a red pepper sauce that was divine), drinking authentic sangria (cinnamon and all!), having great coffee... basically, NOT DRIVING. The evening at the restaurant culminated in two fun events. The first was me talking to the waiter in Spanish for five minutes after he asked, "?Hablas espa~ol?" I explained the whole Costa Rica and Chile experiences, and he remarked that I speak very well. Yay for my crusty /Castellano/!

The other fun thing that night was Steve attempting to draw Cambridge and surrounding areas on the paper tablecloth. He hasn't been in Boston for too long, but long enough that I would imagine he could get a general map down from memory. Not so. Admittedly, Cambridge is an extremely demented city when it comes to driving; no two streets seem to intersect at a 90 degree angle (or if they do, there are two more streets coming in at all sorts of oblong angles just to make things interesting). Nathan or Rob (can't remember who) mentioned that the layout of the streets was probably a result of the streets having roots in horse trails, which I found incredibly interesting.

Upon returning to the house, I met Sean (Shawn?). He seemed a little more reserved than the other guys, but only until Steve decided to start vacuuming at 1a one night. Then, he certainly had plenty to say, none of it repeatable. :-)

Boston is a beautiful city. Well, we spent more time in Cambridge, which is the really beautiful part. All of the history, all of the intellectuals, all of the cuisine... it's like it was made for me! Seriously, it's the kind of place I'd like to revisit and take Nase, who I also think would love it. Steve was a wonderful host, except for the part where he got deathly ill, but that comes later.

Posted by pcg at September 29, 2003 6:24 PM