(a Boston view from Cambrigde)
so after a brief early morning session of conference, we escape. this first escapade takes place under the standard of what this place is famous for – education. perhaps appropriately we start from the motherchurch of the Church of Christ, Scientist, established by Mary Baker Eddy sometime in the second half of the 1800s, where the Christian Science Monitor is house, just besides our hotel. the way the impressive space is set up, it really seems that people walk on water…
we walk Massachusetts Avenue over the river, to Cambridge, and find ourselves in M.I.T. territory. before Massachusetts Avenue brings us all to Harvard, there’s glimpse of a terroritoy of warehouses that seem to lead to a different world than the overwhelmingly elist academic spaces. Harvard gets us a bit recalcitrant, this is where nadia does her Allahu Akbar video shot (and see, we keep on thinking Samuel Huntington… of course he’s able to come up with his wonderwarland fairy tale theories in this environment… where would he be now… if we dropped in his office and said, hey samuel, now listen to us…). David had insisted i should go to the Widener Library, but when we’re standing in front of it rickard tells us a story he just heard about a student who was asked to show his student card at the library entrance, and before he knew it he was shot down. (later we realize it was the story of the student who got tasered in the UCLA library that got modified along the way… watch the video here if you want to see images of the Patriot Act in action. disturbing in many ways, including the tone of the officer’s voice when he says “stop fighting us”) doesn’t encourage us to go in. (ay, thinking bad of Harvard, after we already got a bit worked up about the “M.I.T Police” and “Harvard Police” cars, when the violation took place at a University of California campus…).
we end up warming ourselves up in a Starbucks near Harvard Square.
hm, so what do we think about this place…