The posts on my MIT trip here are all tagged as ‘Boston’ – but that’s really a bit of a misnomer. Because while all the attractive sites of visitation are indeed in Boston, I’m really living and working in the neighboring city, Cambridge.
According to the Wikitravel’s article on Cambridge, this city has a thing about ‘squares’. There’s Potter Square (nearest to where I’m staying), Kendall Square (near where I work), Harvard Square (where Harvard is), and Central Square – which I haven’t visited yet – among others.
Several of these key city areas are all linked via the ‘T’ subway. The subway transportation network linking Boston and the immediately-surrounding cities is pretty intuitive. The lines are all color-coded (e.g. ‘Red’ – which is the line I’m staying along, ‘Green’, ‘Orange’). I certainly had an easier time figuring it out compared to the unnecessarily complex compass direction-based names used in Singapore’s MRT. Occasionally, I still have problems remembering all the different lines: EAST-WEST, NORTH-EAST, NORTH-SOUTH and what nots.
The train levels in each train stop vary greatly in depth. The Kendall/MIT one for instance – where I alight each day when heading to work – doesn’t go very deep, but the one for home – Porter – runs at least two or three floors of depth. There’s a very long escalator ride each time:
Not photoshopped, and the two pictures above don’t even begin to hint how high the escalator goes. And it doesn’t even go up to the ground level!
The train level platforms are all open: and imagine – back at home there’s talk about whether these levels need barriers to stop people from jumping onto the tracks in suicide attempts.
Incoming trains are routinely announced by the station’s broadcast system, and awaiting passengers will feel an oncoming strong gush of air too indicating an impending train arrival. Sort of like a huge air-conditioning unit supplemented by ten 18-inch fans all switching on at the same time and blowing into your face.:)
The trains themselves aren’t terrifically wide though. In fact, they seem slightly narrower than Singapore’s, and certainly much more so compared to those wide carriages I rode on everyday in Kumamoto City last December.
The trains tend to be quite pack during the usual peak hours, an indication of how much Bostonians rely on the public transportation network considering how expensive is parking and difficult driving is in the city.
One funny sight though which I first remarked when during the San Francisco trip last March was that the iPhone is really ubiquitous. In a row of six passengers, I’ll see five of them (at least) all using their iPhones for music playback or just fiddling with them in general. On occasion I’ll see the odd Blackberry and the candy-bar styled mobile – but those are more the exception than rule. Just for fun, I’ll bring out my Android Galaxy S and playing around with it just so to show the other passengers who bother to look that there’s really a world outside the iPhone. Frankly, owning an iPhone no longer makes you distinct. It makes you part of a compliant lemming crowd in my opinion.
In any case: now that I’ve covered the transportation and residential part, I’m gonna do a next post on the Streets of Cambridge. When I have enough pictures anyway. Before that though, I still have posts to do after visits to the Museum of Science, the (VERY!) lovely Butterfly Garden in that Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts (lots of Monet and Renoir), the Boston Public Library, and the Skywalk Observatory:)
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