Boston houseboat

somehow i thought houseboats are only something that you will see in the netherlands... then i saw one in/on the charles river in boston! i was really surprised.... then i found out through wikipedia that houseboats are seen in many countries (they describe them country by country here). yet i doubt they are as omnipresent as they are in for example the canals in amsterdam. and the above one is really tiny. you can also move it, which is usually no really the case with houseboats in the netherlands. yes, they are floating, but thats about it... i also doubt that houseboats here are used the way they are in utrecht, close to where i used to live; there was an entire strip of houseboats, all with a red light behind the window.... for each houseboat more or less 4; a total of 143 windows or "workspaces" as they call them! i guess you know what i am talking about.... they also have a website, but its in dutch (here). and guess what, those are not in some backward part of town. right next to the "workboats" are normal boats for families. when i finally (but when?!) visit home again, i should take some pictures there... :)

for more interesting wikifacts about red windows and so on in the netherlands, go here!

Female driver

sorry! one day too late. but finally, one more grave from the sleepy hollow cemetery. right next to a bush, are walter and anne bush buried (did they plant the bush on purpose? i thought it very funny, i hope it was on purpose.. :) ). anne was the first woman in the united states to receive a driver's license! i had no clue someone had this honorable title, and i also did not know she was buried in concord, but it was on the cemetery-overview of notable people buried there. of course we had to check out her grave when we saw "mrs walter bush, first woman with a drivers license". when walking to her grave we were joking a little; ah, probably she got her license because they thought she was a man,which woman is called walter bush?! but then we realized that this is how married women are called "mrs. theirbusband'sfirstandlastname". beeghh! she was the first woman with a drivers license, can she please be addressed by her own name?! we also wondered what her grave would look like. would the stone be in the form of a car? would it somewhere say she was the first (auto)mobile lady? i didnt expect that, but indeed it did, perhaps its not very legible on this pic, but here you can clearly see it! (im just wondering who put it there? her family? upon her request.. or?). 

anyways. anne french grew up in washington. her father, a physician, had a steam drive car that he maintained himself. he promised his daughter she got to drive it if she knew how to maintain it as well. and so she did. in 1900 she obtained her license, allowing her to operate a "four-wheeled vehicle powered by steam or gas." then she married walter bush and he took over the wheel. nope, no more driving for her. she later mentioned in an interview that he found that "driving is man’s business. women shouldn’t get soiled by machinery.” and even though she now and then reminded him she was the first woman with a license.. she remained in the passenger's seat. i myself still cannot drive. and tim is very annoyed about that. by now i cannot count the lectures anymore when he tells me how beneficial it would be, for the both of us, but especially for me, if i knew how to drive (i do prefer that over walter bush's view...)

one more cute thing i found: in 1952, the american automobile association (AAA) celebrated their 50th birthday. they tracked down anne and invited her to the celebrations. she had tea with the then-president's wife and did something she apparently always had wanted to do; she got to drive a fire engine!! all that just surprises me that she just let her husband do all the driving once she was married. perhaps she was afraid of what her mother once said to her, before marriage; “no gentleman would be interested in any lady who didn’t stay where she belonged and act like one", in reaction to her daughter driving a car....

theres so much more i wanted to write, regarding cars and women and what-not. but i leave it at this. maybe some other time! here some more photos from the sleepy hollow cemetery.

and go here for all the other taphophiles!

Spring day!

above was in miami, last december during our holiday. it was so weird to be in a place where it was really warm at that time of the year. but i liked it a lot... (and would love another holiday!).

and now, today... it was 22 degrees celsius (71 F) in boston!! everyone was walking around without jackets and some even had found their flip flops... interesting how quickly people dress right for a drastic change in the weather (im not that fast). i hope it will stay like this, if i cant have my snow, this is a very nice alternative!

Summer time

this was last week, a view of the brick desert, about which i wrote before. to the left is the city hall (behind the 2 people in white). this is only part of the brick desert, its perhaps twice as big as you can see here... ? i like the 2 buildings further back, which are both round, like the road (what was there first? the road or the buildings? i guess the road). if you take that street, you will eventually reach the boston common and park street. when i took this photo, it was a little chilly, but today it was very sunny and rather warm again. i was very much in the mood for an ice cream, but the closest provider (mc donalds in this case; i like their sundaes with caramel!), did not have any! buuuhhh. then we went to the lab where they have an ice cream vending machine (never saw that before), but it only took dollar bills, which we did not have. i was very disappointed. perhaps the universe was trying to tell me that i should not eat unhealthy stuff... hmppf.

summertime started here. that was kind of a surprise, an hour less! actually, they dont call it summertime in america. in proper english they do, and in dutch ("zomertijd"), but in american english they call it "daylight saving time". whatever, i like summertime so much better! now if i only could have had that ice cream...

Boston laundromat

a laundromat somewhere in boston. i dared to take only one picture... isnt this what you always see in movies? people waiting in the laudromat, or folding their freshly washed clothes. here, many apartments dont have their own washer or dryer. some complexes do have them in the basement (then you usually have to bring your own detergent and a lot of quarters to make the machines do their job), but the most unfortunate ones have to bring all their clothes to a laundromat. such a weird thing for dutch people that all have their own washer! i was one of the few weirdos who didnt, and brought my clothes home every weekend for a very long time (also, i was afraid of washing machines, they spin so fast and i thought one day the spinning would get out of control. so even when i had a washer, i took a while before i dared using it). there are hardly laudromats in the netherlands, but here they are on every corner, more or less. in our first apartment we had a coin-op washer in the basement, but clothes came out dirtier than when they went in.... luckily, we now have our own washer/dryer... (which makes an apartment immediately considerably more expensive). unfortunately, it looks similar like this one. not much fits in, and somehow the lint that comes off the clothes is later nicely distributed on the black clothes again, making them look... dirty... :( the machine is also much harsher than the dutch ones, even though (or perhaps because) it takes only 30 minutes or so, against 2 hours in a dutch one! so... clothes get worn out much much faster and several shirts already have tiny holes... :( but at least i can do my laundry whenever i feel like...

Newly decorated

i took this pic in new york, when we were there in october. i guess once this building was newly decorated indeed, but now its merely a ghost sign... it was around the time we had to decide if we would renew our lease at our current apartment complex or not. it was expiring at the end of december, so we had to decide 2 months in advance whether to stay or not. as opposed to the netherlands, here you have to rent an apartment by the year or more (you can rent it with a "flexible lease" but then the rent is even higher than it already is...). so.. once you decide, youre stuck for at least another year. the other great thing is that other apartment complexes do not know 2 months in advance whether they will have something available for you or not. so its kind of a gamble; you terminate your lease, yet are not entirely sure whether the new place will have something available (ofcourse, you can always pay double rent for a few months! they do know whats available right NOW!). we did look for some new apartments, but they were all more expensive (and ours is already too expensive)/were less nice & expensive/ not close to a subway station. the worst experience we had at a similar complex as ours. we had an appointment at 10 in the morning. it was cold and windy, and there was nobody. we had to wait outside as we could not enter the complex. when the "leasing officer" showed up nearly 10 minutes late, she said "well yes, it was 10-ish". no apology, nothing. then we were in her office, she had only introduced herself to tim, and then.. while i was next to him ALL the time, she asked him, and only him: "so... what are you looking for? is it for one person?" i was so surprised i did not say anything..... it was one of those moments where you really should have said something, but just nothing came out. grrrrr...

ah well, in the end we decided to stay where we are. boston is only the third most expensive city to rent an apartment (after new york and san francisco), with rents of 1- and 2-bedroom apartments being 51% higher than the national average in 2011. (1-bedroom being $1665 dollars on average, in boston. i can only say we pay more... and we dont even live in boston, but another small town!! beeegh. it does hurt..). 3-bedroom apartments are even 70% higher than the national average!

Winter shoes

i was so happy when i found those! then i had to decide, get them in red, black or blue.... black was too boring. blue too blue. so it was red. and then there was hardly any snow... :( i was really looking forward to the mountains and mountains of snow we surely would get, just like last year. but this time i would be really prepared with a nice set of snow boots...

today it was 20 degrees celsius!! (above 65 F, i guess). and yesterday it was warm too. 

now i just hope we dont get a cold crappy summer..

Hershey kisses

ooh, hershey kisses, how beautiful are they! their form, the silver wrapping, and the cute piece of paper sticking out saying hersheys... in 2004, i was in the usa for the very first time. when going back, i brought 2 big bags of hershey kisses. they were so pretty, and i was sure my parents would love them. months later most of them were still lying around. from the outside still pretty... but now i knew how they were tasting; literally disgusting!! this wasnt chocolate!!

but when i saw them a few weeks back on a grave on the hull village cemetery, next to this adorable angel, i almost wanted to run to the store and buy me a bag... then i remembered their taste again...

so.... i googled "why is hershey chocolate so disgusting?" i was not expecting any answer, but i often google weird questions to be surprised by the (sometimes very useful) answers google gives me. to me, hershey kisses taste ok at first, but then suddenly it tastes like something is not quite right... going to downright disgusting. apparently, im not the only one.... and now i know why; the hershey recipe uses milk that has gone sour (i.e. has gone bad (instead of using buttermilk or cocoa butter)) in their recipe, making it taste.. well yes... like vomit...

i guess most real americans might not taste the vomit, as they are used to eating this chocolate (its like feeding someone something with a weird/distinct flavor from a very early age... you do get used to that..). but no more hershey kisses for me! :)

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.... :)