Hey all!
Though I started doing some online stuff last week, this is my official start to summer research :). I am in a web of programs that confuses even me, but it starts like this: I am in the MSRP (M.I.T. Summer Research Program). From there, I’m in a subset called the Biology MSRP. From there, I’m in a subset called the CBMM- Biology MSRP. Within the CBMM (Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines Undergraduate program), I’m working with Prof. Kanwisher’s lab at MIT, and specifically with one of her graduate students. However, the location that I’m actually doing my research at is HMS (Harvard Medical School), because Prof. Conway, who is my research professor during the school year, is a Wellesley professor but has his lab at HMS, and I am also working with him.
Thus, I am working at HMS with my lab-during-the-school-year, enrolled in a program with the students from the Biology MSRP, collaborating with a graduate student at MIT, and living at MIT.
Got that all straight? …Obviously :). And now that we’re pretty much done with background, and I’m going to start from 2pm today, when I moved into the MIT dorms for the summer :).
At 2pm, Tiffany and her sister dropped me of at McCormick, one of the MIT dorms.
McCormick has two sides connected by a bridge on the ground floor: East and West. I can’t remember which way is East or West right now (heh), but I’m on the left side, aka this one!
McCormick is actually the only MIT dorm I’ve ever visited, because though I took classes at MIT last semester there wasn’t much opportunity to spend time in the dorms. My impression then was that McCormick was lovely, quite like a hotel on the inside, and after settling in that initial thought has only been reinforced. After lugging my boxes across the lawn and up the stairs, this is what my room looked like:
Take a look, guys. THEY PROVIDE SHEETS! AND A PILLOW! This is nonsensical. Since I also brought sheets and a pillow, I just overlaid them all on top of them until my sleeping surface is half an inch thick. Life is good.
Also, as you can see, this room is huge. It’s the size of a double even in the biggest dorms at Wellesley (the New Dorms on East Side). I later learned that I have one of the biggest rooms in the building, and it’s not true that all MIT rooms are enormous. But I was properly jealous for a while there… :).
Here’s my view out the window. Unfortunately, I only get the building next door :). My dormmate across the hall, though, gets an amazing view of the river. Moroever, she just brought me up to the Penthouse, the highest floor of McCormick, and you can see everything from there. Can I live here permanently?
(Trying a little harder to see out my window– you can see part of the Student Center hidden in the trees!)
But after settling in (and realizing I’d forgotten one of my boxes… sigh), I decided that what really needed to be done was food shopping. Last summer when I was in Boston, I ended up doing a lot of food shopping in the night ime, but if I have a choice I like to do my wandering when it’s still light out. So I put on a shirt that wouldn’t show huge amounts of sweat (it’s hot out here in Boston! So excited) and began my quest :).
First I decided to head up Main Street towards Central Square. I had heard from many excited friends that a new H-Mart– an Asian supermarket– had opened in Cambridge, and I was excited to see it for myself. Here I am, heading up Main Street.
And I arrived!
Here’s what greeted me when I walked in. It turns out that H-Mart is not so much an Asian supermarket as a series-of-restaurants/Asian supermarket/normal supermarket complex– they had pretty much anything I could want, and I will definitely be coming back to eat lunch with friends here. However, I also discovered that H-Mart was a lot more like Roche Bros (high-end supermarket in Wellesley) than C-Mart (the lower-end Asian supermarket in Boston’s Chinatown.) And thus, me being on my college-student budget, I decided to go elsewhere.
It didn’t take me long to end up next door, at the Dosa Factory, which I had thought was a restaurant and hadn’t realized was a grocery store too. I poked my head in there– there were different types of people in there than in H-Mart, and different foods on the shelves. But I didn’t see anything I really wanted, so I headed out :).
I was just deciding that maybe I wanted to head to Trader Joe’s instead (and bemoaning my lack of sense of adventure) when I ran into this supermarket. Who knew there were so many places to buy groceries within a hundred feet of Central Square! I wandered in.
Ahahaha. You can just walk in the door and see what this one’s like :). Granola bars, high fiber, vitamins, organic. Expensive, unfortunately. I walked the perimeter and headed out to the subway station.
Here’s Central Station. I warred with myself a little bit on this one, because it was probably only… well, actually, it was probably an hour’s walk from Central Square to the Trader Joe’s on the Boston side of the river. Which is a distance I normally would cover on foot, but I was feeling a bit lazy, and I promised myself that I would walk back. So I hopped down to the subway ($2 with a CharlieCard), and got on board.
Whoops! It turns out that the subway doesn’t take you the logical way to Trader Joe’s (i.e., across the bridge straight across the river), but rather to the center of Boston. This actually makes much more sense in terms of the subway, and I probably would have been better off taking the public Bus 1 to Trader Joe’s. No worries, though. I’d been to Park Street (around the center of Boston) many times, and I knew my way around. I just needed to transfer lines!
Heh heh, wrong green line. I wanted outbound. Try again…
There we go 🙂
I thought I was going to get off at Hynes Convention Center (which is pretty near Trader Joe’s), but instead I got off at Copley, a stop early. I had remembered that Shaw’s (a major supermarket, and cheap!) was sort of on the way, if I could remember how to get there. Here’s Copley Station, receding in the distance…
A really skewed picture of the Boston Library, which is gorgeous, and I’m wasn’t doing it justice here as I walked along taking very rapid pictures with my camera (in the hopes of not looking like a tourist.)
And a still skewed but better picture of the Church across the road.
Ha ha! I recognized my surroundings. Heading up toward Shaw’s.
:).
Where’s the entrance, where’s the entrance… oh, there are the Duck Boats! For anyone visiting Boston, I highly recommend a Duck Tour. They are surprisingly entertaining, picturesque, and informative. I learned a lot about the history of Boston and visited some areas I’d never seen when I took a trip on one of the boats last summer.
And I found the door and went shopping. Shaw’s was great, and I didn’t even have to go Trader Joe’s, which I passed five minutes later! I do love my old haunts– this is the area of Boston (Back Bay) where I was staying last summer. Heading back to MIT was thus a breeze.
This was always my favorite part of my walk last summer– across the river from Boston to Cambridge. It’s a fifteen-minute walk with the Charles River on either side, always windy and 10 degrees cooler over the water. The sky is beautiful, and if isn’t the waves on the water are always changing, and the city’s skyline stands out in the sun or lit up at night. As I was walking along this time, I saw that half of the railings had been draped in knitting. One woman was adding needlework to it as I walked past :).
And I returned to my dorm :). 200 feet away from the entrance to McCormick is the Z-Center, MIT’s main athletic center. I’m in heaven, guys. Heaven.
I’d say it was a successful grocery trip, even if I learned after that there was a closer Trader Joe’s and Star Market on this side of the river :). Morover, I learned that there are farmer’s markets 3 times a week on MIT’s campus, and I know I mustn’t forget how much I love my old stand-bys, Haymarket and Chinatown’s C-Mart. And of course I can walk 300 feet to the Student Center where there is an expensive but super-convenient convenience store. Yup. Love Boston.
I met most of my new doormates and program-mates as well :). We had dinner together– everyone was very welcoming– then headed back to our rooms to finish packing and make tomorrow’s food. I headed back for some time to read as well, because I’m 905 pages into the book “Cryptomicon” and I’m so close to done. Work starts in earnest tomorrow– wish me luck :).
Happy adventures!
Monica