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| Monday, August 6, 2007 03:58 PM |
| Back from Bahstahn |
 by Fëanor |
Our vacation turned out to be one of those vacations that you need another vacation to recover from. We had gone to Boston with few firm plans, except that we wanted to see our friends and go to the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. But once we got there, we came up with a number of other things to do, and it ended up being pretty tiring running all over Boston trying to see everybody and do everything. It didn't help that it was ridiculously hot there, which had apparently been arranged entirely for our arrival; it hadn't been that hot all summer in Boston, and a cold front came in the day we left and dropped the temp by ten degrees. Apparently nobody knows how to properly air condition anything in Boston, so we were pretty much hot the whole time we were there.
But I'm making it sound really awful, and it wasn't. It was great to see our friends, hang out with them, and talk and catch up. We also ate some good food (although events conspired such that poppy was never able to get the clam chowder she'd been looking forward to), had some good beer (I was determined to try an authentic draft Boston beer, and I ended up with a very light, tasty Hefeweizen called the Harpoon UFO), and learned some important things. Like, most cities are pretty much the same, and blend together into one giant world city. For me, the main things I'll remember about Boston that make it stick out a bit from the world city are the fact that its street system is incredibly poorly designed, with bad signage, and it is very difficult to drive anywhere there without getting lost - even if you have GPS (which made us very glad that we went there by train and only took a couple rides in other people's cars). Also, the city is full of skinny women.
We went to the aquarium, the Mary Baker Eddy Museum and Mapparium, the MFA, and... probably a few other places I'm not remembering at the moment. The Mapparium was kind of interesting - a giant stained glass globe the size of a room that you could walk into on a glass bridge, and that had intriguing acoustic properties - but easily the coolest thing we saw was the Edward Hopper exhibit. I already knew I liked Hopper's work, but I really fell in love with him after looking at this great collection. It was interesting to see some of his water colors and green landscapes, but his masterpieces are definitely his cityscapes - his voyeuristic portraits of buildings, empty rooms, and the backs of people. His paintings are full of light and shadow, of implication and atmosphere. It's like you're looking at a single shot from a film, and there's all kinds of story and complexity just outside the edges of the frame. Fantastic.
While I was there, I of course also purchased some comic books. More on those later. And maybe more on the trip later. But for now, I gots to go... |
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