Gloomy weather

the weather was not good this weekend! rain rain rain, greyish sky.... many clouds. this is while waiting for the bus at Lechmere. which we now have to do for only 2 more weeks, then we will move to Melrose.... will it be like the tv series? i used to watch melrose place.. ah well, i hope not, actually!

Bike gang

sitting on the couch, around 11 in the evening. saturday. suddenly a lot of music outside; and yes, there they are again: the bikers. with lots of lights.. one with a discoball (see pic). the bikes look weird.. with very high handlebars. it seems they are gathering at the house with the sign "egobama is a liar" (see post "nice neighbour"). last saturday they met up there around noon, and we heard them again around midnight! were they biking that long? first time i kind of saw them, i thought i was imagining it; it was on the same evening as when a car toppled upside down. but just now i did some googling, and yes, it is a "bike gang", called SCUL (subversive choppers urban legion). according to a blog i just found (they are not easy to find on the net!), they are a non-profit, artistic, bicycling nerd gang based in Somerville. their missions are every saturday, when they head off from a secret base (our street, apparently!) on their ships (i.e. bikes), and the "fleet's flag ship" is responsible for the loud music. the bikers are called "pilots" and us, the normal people, are "civilians". isnt that just veeerrrryyyyy weird?
and no, i am not making any of this up: http://turingcompletewasteoftime.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-i-accidentally-joined-bike-gang.html (describing the gang), and the gang's own website that is very obsure to me, and supposedly so: http://www.scul.org/skynet/index.php
i do miss my bike a lot (havent been on one since leaving the netherlands), but not that much to join this gang... :)

Some flowers

gone are the days where i would just buy some flowers... say 40 or sometimes 60 roses for 5 euros..... here they dont really just sell a bunch of flowers... oh yes, there are bouquets, here is an example. and you read it correct. its 75 dollars. 75 dollars!!! can you believe it? there was also one of 80, but it was smaller.
everytime i see someone with flowers, i think: wow, he/she must have money and does not care to spend it on flowers that last only few days (look at the roses!!), or he really has to make up for something very badly..

Shoe mess

shoe department in the target just before closing time. such a mess!
thats great here, stores are open till 10, 11, or some even 24 hrs a day.
tired now! good night... :)

Our pet

a perfect home ofcourse also needs a pet. there used to live 5 dogs in this house (2 in this apartment, which are sleeping every night on the outer sides of their owner's queen bed; yes, with the owners in the middle, but thats just an unbelievable detail), and all are/were happily shitting in the small garden around the house (yegh! every so often the upstairs girl is running down, throwing her dog in the garden until hes done so she can run up again).
ofcourse, no dog for us. instead we have a venus flytrap! yes, a carnivorous plant! its really cool, it closes its traps within 0.1 seconds. i made successive pics, where you can see the closure. its fun to play with, although im not sure the plant thinks its fun.. just put a piece of plastic between the trap, and whop! it closes! since it is inside, we have to feed it insects (luckily tim likes to do this), but we shouldnt give it hamburger; then it might suffer from indigestion....
if we take good care of it, it can get bigger and get much more traps, but they will not become huge... pfew.... :) as they are eating flies, their size is designed to catch flies and thus will not suddenly become huge and eat my finger.... but... you never know.... right?

King bed

i thought everything in the us of a is big. i thus couldnt quite understand the bed the people we are subleasing from left for us. it is so narrow! it is not very long either, even my legs notice and i dont think im that tall. up till last week i thought we were sleeping on a "queen bed". checking craigslist and furniture stores it seemed however the most common bed... so that made me wonder even more... how can all these... ummm... bigger people than me sleep on a queen?!
last week the people we are subleasing from came to get some of their furniture back, and then they told me we are sleeping on a "full bed" right now. so i catched up on my wikipedia reading and now know there are twin/single beds (for 1 person), full beds (for 1 person in my opinion; 135 cm), queen beds (a little less space than a normal 2-person dutch bed; 152 cm), king beds (essentially 2 twins; 198 cm) and californian king beds. the latter i expected to be enormous... but more reading taught me that it is in between a king and a queen. pfffffttt.
but all that reading did not turn our frustrating full (every night i wake up several times) into a king. but look at the pic: there is everything, except a mattress, to build a king, even a fancy nightstand!!!! jeeeejjj!!! another visit to craigslist yesterday; there was someone so very kind to give us their not used anymore bedframe..! so... thanks again to everyone who gave us their furniture; the couch, the bookshelf, the lamps (see pic), the huge tv, the futon (my sister will visit us in august) and now the bedframe!! :) the us of a is not that bad at all....!

Sudden storm (2)

the sudden rainstorm from yesterday still amazes me, therefore another picture. this one was taken within the same minute as the one from yesterday. as you can see, here the buildings in the background are not yet covered in clouds, and in less than a minute, it was all gone... (see yesterday)!

Sudden storm

we took the ferry from boston to charlestown to see boston from a boat. while the ferry took off, the weather turned crazy in just 2 minutes. when we left, boston was still "normal", but within seconds, clouds came trickling down, covering the buildings. it was amazing to see, and unfortunately impossible to photograph. while still standing jaw-dropped, very very heavy rain started, and we all were urged inside, but the few seconds it took to downstairs were enough to get wet entirely. in no time boston disappeared in thick clouds. we were in a floating cocoon and all there was to see was water and rain, instead of boston :(
the plan was to walk around a little in charlestown and then catch a bus back home. but... there was toooo much wind and rain, and we thus took the ferry right back (it was only $1.70). luckily that was enough time for the weather to turn a bit back to normal and we could take some more nice pics of cloudy boston...

Getting furniture

.... is supereasy in boston! i love craigslist, there is soooo much.. for free, or just a little (the red chairs perfectly fit the table, i think, and they were very cheap). and the table, as mentioned before, we got from a yardsale across the street, which are also great... every weekend its like queen's day somewhere around. i dont need to (or try not to) buy new books anymore, you find easily books in yard sales, goodwill stores, or thrift stores, and never more than a dollar... :)
then today we also got a verrrryyy nice armoire (i like the word) for almost nothing; now i finally have a place to put my underwear etc.., and a big, beautiful bookshelf for free!!! when we came to pick it up, the girl also gave us 2 lamps she did not need anymore, and they are also pretty!
so... i think by now we have our household more or less complete, and for very little money :) only very important thing that is still missing, is a good bed.... and thats not so easy here...
and when one day we leave boston... we can do a yardsale ourselves... and sell/give it very cheap to others like us! :)

Traffic sign

in several streets i saw this sign already. isnt it funny...? "slow children".
i have photographed more... its really nice they always let you know why it is you have to drive slowly... (would it help?)
so, more to come in future posts

Fire alarm

staying with the MFA (museum of fine arts). when we just got in, the fire alarm went off and we all had to go out. there it was clearly visible that the MFA has an interesting collection of museum guards. above a nice example. anyone who asked what was going on she answered: if there is a fire alarm in the subway, do you ask whats going on? no, you do not. you leave. so dont ask me. when a cab drove by, she said to no one in particular: what is he driving here while there is a fire alarm?!
right when i was leaving the lab today, there was also a fire alarm. dont know what was going on as i was leaving anyways... and when we just got home, a fire-engine was stopping right at our house. and then the firemen came to our door to ask whether there was a fire as they were warned there was one. there wasnt one in our house.. and then they just left, they did not even try at the door next to ours, where there are 4 more apartments.
ah, and it is very hot and humid today, but luckily we did not notice any fire..

Self portrait (2)

staying with the self portraits here... ah yes, am i lazy! (sorry! i will come up with something more interesting soon, i hope.. :) ) not only are we in the museum, but also in the mirror of the green line....

Self portrait

lazy today and yesterday... i didnt put a post yesterday as i fell asleep on the couch around 9.30, and brutally was woken up by tim around midnight, after which i just continued sleeping in bed (oh yeah, what an interesting account of my sleeping habits here..!).
anyways... this was taken in the museum of fine arts as well. well, isnt it a fine piece of art? :P

Endlessly repeating

we were in the museum of modern art today. the entrance fee is 20 dollars, but today it was free because of Memorial day (which we in fact totally missed.. :( ah, and we did not have to work today!). above a part of a huge piece of art, called "Endlessly repeating twentieth-century modernism". it was really beautiful. with special mirrors the artist created a seemingly endless repetition of the objects; depicting the capitalist notion that all objects are eternally repeatable, that everything can be remanufactured endlessly without regard to era, geography, or culture. im not sure whether i agree with that (in fact i dont), but it was fascinating to look at. it had 4 sides, but it was placed stupidly, so one side you could not really look at. below there was a normal mirror, in which you could see yourself, from waist to feet. it was funny that most people totally ignored the beauty, and walked by, just looking at their reflected selves....
maybe another day i post a picture of the entire object.

Smart marketing

prudential center does not have that many nice shops. but it does have zombies once a year (see yesterday), and it has a food court where they have one shop that sells good coffee (which is rare), and very very tasty cookies... so we wanted some cookies. since it was almost closing time, you got 2 cookies for the price of one, that was nice!. we thus choose 3 cookies and got 3 for free. but then the lady said: ah, if you have 6 cookies, you get another 6 for free! and thus we were so stupid to choose now 12 cookies, resulting in us paying for 6 cookies, instead of the 3 cookies we initially wanted.... now isnt that a smart sales-technique.... she got rid of her last cookies and she made us pay for them without us realizing it at that moment.
but the box she put the cookies in was sooo nice and i liked to walk around with it.. :) and we still have many cookies.. (1 cookie is almost like a meal....).

Bostonian zombies

sitting in the subway there was a couple putting blood stains on themselves with red paint. the guy wound a bandage around his head, and the girl was putting one around her knee. a party, we thought?
somewhat later while leaving prudential center, many, many scary-looking people were walking towards the food court entrance of Prudential. the stream of people seemed endless... and the wounds all over their bodies looked very real.... must have been scary, sitting in the food factory, eating your fries.. and suddenly all these zombies coming in. i think there were like 500 zombies flooding prudential center. but as sudden as they appeared, they were also gone again.
what it was? no clue! and so far i have not been able to find anything on the internet about it..
in this pic the girl is "handing out" blood......

Proud graduate

during lunch i saw this. he is in front of the nice building... :)
and his girlfriend takes a picture. after many more pictures followed.... real fun to see.
glad i did not have to wear something like that during my PhD defense!

Bus stop

as told before, to get somewhere, we need to take the bus first. what i do not understand here, is that the bus stop is merely a sign for the bus to stop. and, ah yes, it says which bus number stops there and what its final destination is. but a schedule? o no, that you will not find... and thus you can never just pass a busstop and think: ah, lets check whether a bus might come in 5 mins.. and depending on that, either walk on or wait for it.... grr....
good we're moving to a place close to the subway...

Harvard tent

the view onto the Harvard medical school is currently blocked by an enormous tent. since thursday they are working on this tent continuously. it really looks ugly. i found out why its there: for the graduation ceremony. also weird: here, you defend your PhD thesis. but you do not graduate yet.. no, that is together with ALL other PhDstudents during a massive ceremony and i now know it will be in this massive, ugly tent. it now has tables in it, and even ceiling fans (lots of them; it actually is very hot since a few days now). when i passed today, i saw that each entrance is guarded by two poles that at first glance reminded me of ticket validating machines (for the soon-not-existing-strippenkaart!). i already wondered why the hell those would be needed for a graduation ceremony (maybe to validate your PhD-degree?). but then i saw that of course these are hand-sanitizer-dispensers...
crazy americans!! everywhere, at any place, these stupid things are present. maybe to ensure that you receive your PhDdiploma with clean hands.....?

Lab picture

defrosting the freezer goes very quickly with a hairdryer. the noise is gruesome, however.... well-known problem in the US is the limited labspace. is that why in my current lab nobody ever cared to defrost the freezers? i think half of the freezer's space is taken by ice. i never saw a worse -80 before (not in the pic.. :) ). tomorrow a bigger freezer is to be defrosted. yeeey.
luckily its hot outside.