end of week wonders

this is the end of a long-anticipated weekend, and i am glad with how it has turned out. it has concluded with a home-cooked meal, fewer readings left to do than there were saturday morning, and a general sense of ease.

saturday

on saturday morning i took the commuter rail in to boston to visit a high school friend studying in cambridge, along with several transfer/international students she had met there. the plan was to visit the museum of fine arts or the gardiner museum, but by the time we had assembled, we decided the weather was too nice to ignore and abandoned our plans in favour of wandering outside. we started our meander at the boston commons and public gardens, two idyllic spaces with tourists and locals strolling through at various degrees of patience.

we followed the freedom trail (a red brick line that takes you past many old buildings and boston monuments) for a bit and then detoured toward quincy market for lunch. i had been expecting a farmer's market from the name - having never heard of the place before - but it ended up being a large building filled with lunch-type food vendors and upscale boutiques surrounding it. there were a number of buskers and street performers, and to add to the good cheer, a giant flock of college guys obviously pledging to a fraternity, who one by one would march up to pretty young women with a rose in hand and ask if they would like to go to a party that night. regardless of the response from the embarrassed woman, the whole group would suddenly burst into bleats of "give him a hug!" which made me laugh hysterically for some time...have you ever heard thirty guys yell the same thing before?

when we got tired of the market, we wandered around the back, hoping to find a place to sit down, and bumped into a real market, run by mostly hispanic bostonians, where all the fruit and vegetables were ridiculously inexpensive. i bought a giant eggplant, three boxes of strawberries, and a big bag of grapes for three dollars, while other possible one-dollar options included three pounds of tomatoes, or five nectarines, or a dozen ears of corn. amazing! we wondered why everything was so cheap, hoping the foods were not contaminated, but just too ripe to sell elsewhere. we had a giant fruit dinner on park benches, where we were approached by a man with a camera ('take my photo?') who talked to us about shooting a moose with a bow and arrow in montebello, quebec when he learned we were from canada. sketchy...

the evening ended with a jaunt into chinatown, a rummage through a beautiful used and rare bookstore, and a stroll toward the train station, from which i caught the train into bridgewater, my new (it's becoming) home.


sunday

this has been a quieter day of pondering and reading, catching up on loose ends, and doing odd chores. i left my room with the intent of going to the library, but again was distracted by the beautiful day and walked around the residential neighbourhood south of west campus until i got too warm, and then found a spot in the shade of a big old maple tree to do my readings. [let me add here that i procured a cup of fair trade coffee from the east campus commons caf!! it was blueberry scented...]

the rest of my afternoon was spent devouring books and articles, picking up odds and ends at the cvs, discovering that bridgewater has a second hand book store - i bought the bostonians as a lark - and learning that due to the override at the recent municipal election, bridgewater's one public library is due to close by october. what a shame!

i spoke with some very friendly people working in the cafeteria, learned that botswana has an aids rate of 38 percent while reading my anthropology textbook (and surprised myself by my visceral anger, coming quite close to tears), and cooked up a dinner that was much too salty. all in all, it has been a wholesome weekend and i'm looking forward to the next few days before i head back to ottawa for the weekend.