Sleepy hollow

last week sunday we were indecisive of what to do. i cannot remember a day off that we stayed home, but sometimes it takes some time to decide on where to go/what to do. museum? beach? mall? eeehhhmm... cemetery? i guess tim was convinced when i mentioned this cemetery is named "sleepy hollow" (sleepy hollow is famous because of the tale by washington irving, "the legend of sleepy hollow", after which tim burton made a movie, which we both like a lot and watched again this weekend (also because its with johnny depp...). the original sleepy hollow is in the state new york).

this cemetery is in concord, massachusetts, a 30 minute drive from boston. it was pretty chilly, but very sunny, and before we knew it, we spent nearly 3 hours on this cemetery! there were many interesting graves, old and new, it was rather big, but mostly, it was just so beautiful. it was named sleepy hollow before it was a cemetery, and locals often picknicked there. among those were nathaniel hawthorne and his fiancee (later wife), who actually dreamed of building a castle there. but...  in 1855, with a speech of waldo emerson, it opened as a cemetery (both hawthorne and emerson were later buried on this cemetery).

perhaps you agree with me that the above picture is more a lovely place in the woods, with some graves. and this is how this cemetery was "designed". or rather, not designed. much of the original vegetation has been left in place, and the graves were more or less just placed in the natural landscape, in line with the transcendentalism movement that developed in new england between 1830 and 1840 (that wikilink is actually a quite interesting read!). many of the major figures in this movement are buried in sleepy hollow. we saw the graves of hawthorne, emerson, thoreau, alcott and channing, among others. some you can see here on my flickr page. but there were more interesting graves, which i will show you next week!

for other taphophiles, go here...

Forgotten drinks

to me, it seems that americans cannot go anywhere without holding some sort of beverage or another in their hands. im not sure how much they drink of it, however. they always seem pretty full, is it more of an accessory than a drink? americans tend to forget it everywhere, as soon as they put it down, somehere, anywhere really, they forget all about it. and thus you see cups with all sorts of drinks standing around everywhere. literally. on the street, in the subway, on some shelf in a shop... one time a guy even forgot his in the overhead compartment in the airplane. until i told him to please take it...

just this sunday we had lunch at some tiny tiny bakery in boston, there were only 6 seats or so. but we managed to get 2. the sandwich and croissant were sooooo good! on top of that, the coffee was yum too. but it came in..... paper cups. my delicious macchiato, and only a horrible wooden stirrer to enjoy the milk foam... :( buuuuhhh! why do even the nicest of places serve coffee in paper cups? (the bread at least was on a real plate).

ah well... above you see a bubble tea, somewhere in chinatown. i tried a sip of bubble tea only once, and thought it was disgusting... so i do understand someone left that behind... :) (just click the link if you want to know what wikipedia has to say about bubble tea!)

Topless goddess

saw this car when driving into boston. i so expected a man in this car.... but... it was a woman, and she was very angry with everyone else on the road, judging from her gestures...

Falling ice

last year i noticed that when it snows a lot, a lot of snow builds up on the roofs, and every now and then quite large chunks can suddenly fall down due to melting, refreezing etc.. so many buildings have signs around their entrances warning you for falling ice. this year these signs have not been necessary, or hardly. but last week we saw one somewhere in downtown boston. on a very sunny, almost springlike day. someone put a bag of ice next to it, still half full with ice cubes, which i found very funny..... but why? and what was there first? the sign or the bag? and when it was melted... did they remove the sign.. ?

thursday night we actually had a little more snow than wednesday night. but still very little. perhaps an inch (a few centimeters)? yet the management of our apartment complex apparently thought we do need snowfree walkways. and thus the maintenance team woke me up with their shovels scraping the paths around our apartment, removing the tiny bit of snow.... at 4.30 in the morning! i was quite annoyed, especially because it was sooo not necessary.... (or did someone place bags of ice everywhere..?)

Brutalist style

here im standing in the brick desert, or officially known as city hall plaza. in the back you see the city hall of boston. i didnt know the surrounding plaza was nicknamed brick desert, but its a very apt term... and im a little sad i never came up with that myself! i was trying to picture the ugly city hall, but in my pic the clouds were all wrong, so im taking tims... with me in it. apparently this building is built in the brutalist style. i would just call it ugly (and a little scary)... its massive, grey, overwhelming, and reminds me of some communist-style building in eastern europe. it was one of the first things we saw the very first time we were in boston. a saturday morning, rainy and cold, no people on the street... that certainly left us wondering where that great, lovely, amazing boston city was where so many people had told us about.

this is one of these pics that i see and think; oh, is that really me? i didnt know i looked like that! (i dont know whether im just weird or other people somtimes think that of themselves as well?) and ow, is my hair really that extremely, ridiculously long? i have never been to a hairdresser since im here... tim has cut it a few times, but the last time was really quite a while ago...

Low clearance

its snowing a bit again, so another pic with some snow in it..

this is memorial drive, a road that runs along the charles river. according to google maps, its called memorial drive on the cambridge side, and storrow drive on the boston side (as you can see here), and as you can see above, its only for cars. trucks, buses, anything not a car is not allowed on it. i dont really like this road, its often crowded and everyone drives so fast and masshole style (but you do get a great view of boston)! besides, especially the first few times the signs that you can see above really freaked me out. we have a real big american pickup truck, and every time i was afraid we were not really allowed on this road, and surely would hit this "cars only" sign. if not, then we would get stuck under the low bridge (for which the sign is actually warning..). because thats what this sign is for; trucks and buses do not fit under the bridge and will get stuck. ofcourse, we never got stuck... but every now and then, despite the many, many warning signs, a truck enters this road and gets stuck. as you can imagine, this generates a mess and long traffic jams. we were once watching a free movie at the hatch shell, right next to storrow drive, and suddenly there was this awful, loud shrieking noise... yep, a truck that barely made it, perhaps shaved off a bit of the bridge while just driving on with great speed. on september 1st, when all the new students move into town, often rented moving trucks get stuck, as people tend to forget they are driving something huge..

but the most funny incident i just read on wikipedia... once... a truck got stuck transporting.... scissors! they got spilled all over the road and 30 cars ended up with flat tires. detailed as wikipedia is, 2 cars even got 4 flat tires. the road was closed for hours....

Its snowing!!

it started snowing this afternoon. tiny, very very tiny flocks, but many of them. they covered the trees but not the streets.... its still snowing right now, but its mixed with rain, it seems, and still not much on the ground. i do hope it looks like this when we walk to the subway station tomorrow morning... that would be nice! this is once again an old pic from january. i spent quite some time going through old pictures this evening, and not one was to my liking. grrr... so i settled for this one. 

although i have walked this path almost every day now for the past 1.5 years, it was only this time that i really noticed the houses behind the train. suddenly they looked cute, and very american. i guess the snow made them stand out. time for bed now. hope to wake up to a fresh pack of snow....

Hull village

so... this is the hull village cemetery, from which i showed you one grave last week. right in front of you is the "mixed-faith jewish" section, which is there since 2008. its for "interfaith" couples who wish to be buried together (as opposed to the consecrated jewish section, where only those with the jewish faith can be buried). to the right (not on the pic) are the oldest graves, from before 1900, also facing the ocean. down to the left are the newer graves. the remainder is somewhere in between old and not so new.. i liked that the graves here are not really placed in a strict pattern, but more scattered, with quite some space between them. you are allowed to drive on the rather narrow paths, but i keep finding that weird and interfering (especially on this cemetery that is not that huge), so we parked somewhere else. if you drive down here, you get to nantasket beach, which is very nice, especially in summer. but if you were to turn around, you will find a little path through the bushes and some steep concrete wall. the first time we were here, i was very curious what was there, and without telling tim, i just went up and discovered an entire abandoned fort! i felt kind of like an explorer, haha, except that i was not the first going there and my journey was not very long or with many hardships... the fort is in a really bad shape, and almost entirely covered in graffiti (more about that fort some other time).

here you can see some more pictures of the cemetery that i posted on flickr. there were interesting stones, beautiful personal messages and funny names or combinations that i could not ignore.. :)

for more taphophile tragics, go here!

Do you...

.. know whats going on here? because i dont! some window, i think an office window, in downtown boston.

not really graffiti, haha, not at all! but all i could find around here... 

for real murals, go here! :)

Charles MGH

charles/mgh, thats the name of the subway stop where i took this picture. thinking of it, it might well be the only stop that looks kind of modern in entire boston. at least of the ones that i have seen. actually, its only the glass cage that leads you to the platform thats modern... 

charles is for the charles river that you will cross when taking the outbound train to cambridge. mgh is for massachusetts general hospital that you will see on your left when taking the inbound train into boston. ofcourse, there is a wikipedia page for this red line stop. however much i love wikipedia, i never felt the urge to contribute to it myself, and often wonder how/when and whom decides its time to make an entry about certain things. but... it did tell me that the bridge that you are on when crossing the charles with the red line is named the longfellow bridge. i kind of knew that, reading it. what i didnt know, is that this bridge is also called the salt-and-pepper-(shaker)-bridge (shaker is apparently optional). this is because of the shape of the central towers on the bridge. hmm... we crossed this bridge several times by foot, yet i never thought, hey, those look like salt and pepper shakers! so... one day i have to go back and picture them, so that you can tell me what you think... :)

No loitering

no loitering.... loitering is a funny word. it looks funny, but i never heard someone say it. when i say it, it sounds funny, but perhaps im pronouncing it all wrong... :) im still waiting for an opportunity to tell someone to stop loitering... haha.

you see this "command" hanging every here and there. for example, at the start of the path to our apartment complex is a bridge leading to a street of (i think) single family homes. every night around ten, this bridge is locked for reasons that are beyond my understanding, and early in the morning its opened again. next to this bridge is the "no loitering" sign. but how can you not loiter there, if you cannot pass the bridge if you fail to come home before 10?! (locals actually know a way past the 2 gates on either side, so i really dont see the point of locking it. perhaps to make the no loitering sign useful?).

so... no loitering means that you are not allowed to remain in a certain public space for a certain amount of time (dutch translation here). wikipedia is not very helpful, other than mentioning its mostly prohibited in the US, UK and australia. in theory you could get arrested for loitering. i dont really like the image, the policeman with baton and the 3 guys, casually hanging around. the one standing is smoking. even with this simple image, they managed to throw in some stereotypes!

the sign above was at the subway station (green line, science park), above a bench. but isnt waiting for a train some kind of loitering too... ? how am i supposed to wait for a train then.. ?

Oooohh, beeeghhhh..

i take so many pictures... and then i just copy them to my laptop, view them. select some. forget the rest. i usually do not take the time to throw out at least the unsharp ones... i do sometimes copy them to an external disk, as im so afraid to loose them. and... because my computer is overflowing. beeghh. i should sort them out. also, i am planning to make a photobook from our road trip. i should write emails. sort out papers. ooh, shit, and file my taxes (iieeekk!! last year was such a frustration, i dont want to do it again..). but what do i do when i come home? on a good day, to the gym. on a lazy one.. just cooking... then couch. then bed. 

im very frustrated with my computer, too. the past few weeks it suddenly became extremely slow. time for a new one? beeehhh... 

i wish i could just do like the cute dog above. enjoying some sun.... :)

The universe

im really tired and not at all in a writing mood. i was in the kitchen all night and half of my "experiments" there failed... buuuh. ah well, im not alone, according to the universe. pfew. that was in cambridge, close to the charles river on some lamp post...

Impossible heels

i like shoes. at home we have this cute bench of which you can lift the seat, revealing a lot of storage space. many of my shoes are in there (although not all.... it didnt fit). sometimes i look in it, and see a pair i had forgotten about... yeejj! i also like to try on shoes. especially here in the us, where the heels seem higher and the shoes more ridiculous. i dont own a pair of high heels as pictured above, but i have tried on many models and had tim picture it (here another example). this furry model was in the sales section, there were many of them. i guess they were just too weird....

when we were in miami during new year's eve, we saw many, many dressed up ladies. heels like this or higher. and most ladies were not very well trained in walking on them. it was fun to see... 

when we were about to return to our hotel, we saw 3 girls. it could have very well been the girls we saw earlier that day on the beach. they were all wearing a super short skirt and killer heels. then... one of them dropped her phone. she reached out her hand to pick it up, but at the same time the other hand went to the back of her skirt, and she realized she could not pick up the phone. there they were, standing on the sidewalk like 3 bambi's, just learning how to stand on their hoofs. she reached out her hand again, but the pavement was really far away! i was about to walk back and pick up that phone when another passerby did just that. and guess what?! right after that she dropped it again, and the entire scene repeated itself. standing there helplessly on their impossible heels. but being oh so pretty....

i wish i could have taped that!! most certainly, if i ever were to make a movie, that would be one of the scenes i would include... :)

Grave post

i dont know how to start this post. i guess by telling which cemetery we visited, where, and why. it was this saturday, and we went to hull. we planned on going there this weekend, but only if the weather would be good. the weather turned out perfect, and off we went... we have been to hull many, many times in all kinds of weather, and i never get bored of it. it is a bit of a drive, as it is at the far end of a peninsula in the massachusetts bay (by boat its very close to boston actually, but the ferry only goes during the week :(. i have posted many pictures of hull on this blog (here, here and here, for example). the indians called the area nantasket, which means low-tide place. hull history means lifesaving; their lifesaving post, opened in 1889, saved 1000s from shipwrecks. yet 19 to 30 people still drown around hull every year.

last year, we discovered the hull village cemetery. we literally drove right into it. its situated on a hill, overlooking the ocean. it was the first cemetery i ever saw with such an amazing view.... i think i will dedicate next week's post to this cemetery as well, so that i can show you how beautiful it is. this week i want to show you just one grave. it was in the newer section. usually i avoid the "new section". all the stones are uniform, as are the rows, perfectly aligned. but not so in this cemetery. many stones had very personal messages engraved. the above one had one too, but of a different kind... and then i saw the age of this person, steven coble. only 2 years and exactly one month older than me, yet by now i am 4 years older than he ever got...

of course i wondered what happened. but this is not some ancient grave. was it ok to google around, and find his story...? eventually i did.... and it just made me sad. the missing persons site told me that on feb 16, 2006 around 11 pm, 26 year old steven coble and his 18 year old cousin went fishing. their canoe capsized, and while the cousin was found hours later shivering on a rock 65 yards off the shore, there was no sign of steven. in another newspaper i found that only on april 18, steven's body was found in the waters of hull. a sternman on lobster boats, he loved the water and fishing. he had 2 daughters and was engaged.

these are "facts". i just found them on the internet. but the stickers say so much more.

for more taphophiles, go here.

Presidents day

this is the side of a house in lowell, massachusetts. this is not an uncommon sight in the usa, i have seen them smaller, and a little bigger (but mostly smaller), but i never managed to take a photo, usually because we were driving by and i saw it too late. here i made tim stop (and we were a bit lost, so it was a good opportunity to look at the map). i thought it appropriate for today, as it is presidents day, a federal holiday in the us.

this day was implemented in 1879, to honor george washington, the first american president. it was originally on his birthday, february 22, and was also the first holiday to honor an american citizen. it was then named washington's birthday, and thats how it is still described in the american law that describes federal holidays. but from 1971, presidents day has always been on the third day in february, as dictated by the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. i find that very funny. the uniform monday holiday act (i dont think they call it UMHA, although americans love these kind of acronyms). i guess thats american regulation and efficiency all in one! as such, many american holidays are always on a designated monday, so that americans then always have a 3-day weekend, instead of some random day off in the week (perhaps also to prevent people from taking off more days in order to MAKE it a long, even longer, weekend?). 

presidents day... i do find it complicated... although by law its still named washington's birthday, its now more known as presidents day, and supposedly more regarded as a day to honor the office of the presidency rather than a specific president. ah well... not much honoring was going on at our place, we got earlier than normal, to be at the dentist at 8 (yuk), then groceries, then major housecleaning (beehh, not done yet), then some work and then it was evening again...

for more monday murals, go here!

Golden dome

i took quite some pictures during the snowstorm in january, but since we havent had any snow since, those pics look a bit out of place.. :( but i like this one so much! today we were here again, its in the boston common, and you can see the state house in the back. today skies were perfectly blue, and the sun was shining. it was really nice walking around, and my wintercoat was too warm...

the state house was builst between 1795 and 1797 (i was surprised by that, somehow i thought it was built more recently). you can visit the state house, but we still didnt get to that...

i like its golden dome, you can see it from many places. when on the banks of the charles river, on the cambridge side, you can see it shine. originally, however, the dome was made of wood shingles! in 1802, it was covered by copper, to prevent leakage. first it was painted grey, and later yellow. in 1874 it got its real golden layer... then i found that it was painted black during world war II. the article doesnt mention why, which was my first question, ofcourse! amazing, how you can just type your question into google, and when its somewhere on the internet, it will pop up.... so.... the answer is..... it was painted black to prevent reflection during blackouts. this to protect boston from potential bomb attacks. i found that here, where you can also read why there is a little pine cone at the very top of this dome (i had never seen that, i guess you have to be closer to the dome to be able to see that).

A party?

saw this car last week, next to ours, just had the chance to snap a quick pic when he passed us. i thought it looked funny. were they going to a party?

or did they perhaps kidnap the balloonman.... ?

everything is possible!

Park street

last week or so we were sitting at park street, waiting for the train to come, the train in the other direction was just leaving (im thinking really hard where we went or came from, i cant remember, and i think its odd we were waiting for a red line, but we clearly were, as you can see...; our home is on the orange line). in weekends and evenings trains come less frequent, and its not that crowded, so i felt more free to take some pics.

when we were in boston for the very first time, we rented an apartment close to the park street stop. it took a while to figure out this station (in fact we didnt manage to figure it out during that week). you can walk to the orange line, the red line, and upstairs you can catch the green line. but it was not clear to me, at all, how to get from one platform to the other. especially when arriving on the green line "outbound"... complete desorientation. "i see the platform i want to go to now, but HOW do i get there?!" to complicate matters even further, there are 4 different green lines "inbound", and i had no clue how people knew which green line goes where (then i found out they have letters, B, C, D, and E, and there are 2 platforms, B & C stop on one side, behind each other, D & E on the other. but this took me months!!). the designation "inbound"& "outbound" was weird to me too at first, they sort of randomly choose the center of the city, and depending on that, directions are given as in- or outbound (sort of like up- or downtown, i guess, only boston is just so tiny!)

hmmm, i guess this is boring, if you have never been to park street in boston. if you ever go; remember that you are allowed to cross the tracks of the green line at park street. you dont have to wait until a train arrives, going in on one side, and leaving on the other..... :) (when someone told me that, i was just glad not being the only one who thinks this station is very complicated...).

Through glass

watching the fireworks during chinese new year from behind the window...