Adrift on Campus

We dedicated today to Boston’s most outstanding features: MIT and Harvard. This is probably what the city is known for nowadays, apart from a certain Tea Party. We took along Lawrence, a brit we’d met yesterday evening on a visit to Boston U’s observatory’s public star gazing. He was a pretty likable fellow, and he didn’t seem to mind being double-teamed by germans too much.

We started by walking across the river to MIT’s campus. Unfortunately, on campus, all you can do as an uninformed visitor is look at buildings, and since that grew boring pretty quick, we went down the road to the MIT museum. This is basically the place where MIT tries to tell everyone how clever they are, and they do a pretty good job of it: Genetic mutation experiments on zebrafishes, the car concept of the future (well, I’m skeptic), stroboscope fotography of very quick processes… it’s been quite fun. I even picked something up at the museum store:

http://www.fascinations.com/unique-toys-gifts/astro-blaster.htm

It’s a toy that couples several rubber balls to transfer the momentum from dropping it into the small top ball. The result is that when you drop the four balls, only the top flies away, but several times to drop height. It works as advertised, and when I’m done showing it to all of my friends, my mother gets it for her physics classes.

After a nice lunch at a student bar (named the “miracle of science”), where I got the first respectable hamburger on american soil, we proceeded to Harvard. We had even less orientation on campus, and after waffling around quite a bit, we went into the Fogg art museum. This is very posh and a lot less playful than the MIT thing: It’s more renaissance and sculpture and 19th century european art. We were a little bit tired by then, but it was still okay.

After finishing the museum, we picked up a map for our upcoming trip to NYC. We’re planning on visiting Plymouth, and if possible, the Norman Rockwell museum along the way. We’ll be sleeping at a motel once, before approaching NYC. I think it’s going to be great, over all.