Taking T in the snow

BOSTON, JANUARY 2011

One weekend I went to a wedding in Boston… as you do. That’s Boston. Massachusetts, not Boston. Lincolnshire. The wedding was of a dear friend and ex-flat mate of my daughter, and she plus one had been invited. I volunteered to be the plus one.

I flew in on Thursday afternoon, taking a flight from Manchester and connecting in London. The Manchester flight was late and this would be my first encounter with Heathrow Terminal Five. To my great surprise and satisfaction, despite barely 30 minutes between my plane landing and the Boston one taking off, my luggage actually made it to America at the same time as I did. Once there, and not being a great one for taxis, I decided to use the subway to get into town. Or “rode the T” as they say in Boston.

I joined my daughter (who had come up from Sydney to be one of the bridesmaids) at the Ames boutique hotel right in the middle of town. Boston has a pretty compact centre and does not have a grid pattern, so getting around can be confusing – although if you get lost you don’t have to walk miles to regain your bearings. It is basically an 18th century English city in which beautiful brick meeting houses and churches find themselves surrounded and engulfed by skyscrapers. Somehow this makes the skyscrapers mind their manners, so they are less overbearing than in some other American cities.

The wedding itself was a wonderful occasion. The service was in the chapel of Boston University (Bob the groom’s alma mater) late on Saturday afternoon. Although not mentioned in the printed stationery, I performed a key role in the ceremony, that of Minder of the Bridesmaids’ Handbags. Afterwards we all repaired to the thirty-third floor penthouse State Room of a building in town with stunning views of Boston harbour by night for a fabulous party.

The weather was staggeringly cold – as low as minus nineteen Celsius on Monday. There was a decent dump of snow on Friday morning but this is something the Bostonians take in their stride. Even as the flakes were falling snow ploughs were out clearing the streets and men with all kinds of snow shifting machines were clearing the pavements. This is obviously the trick – you don’t wait until the snow is set on the ground before you try and clear it; you push it out of the way when it has just fallen. As a result, even though it was perishing cold, the roads and streets were kept 99.9% free of snow and ice. Part of this efficiency is because the law says you must clear the pavement outside your property. I took a trudge round the old North End district and met several snow clearers (using plastic shovels), one of whom was a Brazilian ex-professional footballer. We talked a bit about the relative strengths of Manchester City and Man U, although he was obviously much more knowledgeable on the subject than I was.

While my daughter was busy helping with last minute wedding preparations, I headed off for a couple of boy’s days out. First stop was the MIT Museum, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You went in and reached the exhibitions via a musical staircase that played delightful and complex tunes as you climbed the steps. It’s inevitably full of fascinating delights, and I really enjoyed Aude Oliva’s hybrid illusions, and films of the craziest physics lectures I’ve ever seen. In fact most of MIT’s course material is free on the net so you can save yourself around $100,000 in course fees and avoid the embarrassment of getting lousy marks on your assignments if you’re not a genius. Walking round the MIT campus is an eye opener – a new Frank Gehry building looks like it’s falling down (deliberately), while a small 1940s building just had “Cyclotron” written over the door. Imagine how much fun you could have in there, smashing atoms until the early hours.

The next day I spent an equally good time in the Science Museum. It had the inevitable aircraft hanging from the ceiling, but this was a Naboo N-1 Starfighter from Star Wars. Again, loads and loads of fascinating stuff – including an exhibition on diabetes (big problem in America) set out inside a giant blood vessel. I listened to a little lecture about sports head injuries. On a roller coaster you might pull 5g in the dips. American football players typical take head knocks that range from 50g to 200g! The helmets don’t make a lot of difference, and they are worried about the long term damage (including early dementia) that dozens if not hundreds of head knocks are doing. Perhaps the answer is better helmets – or maybe it’s no helmets at all. Sometimes making something more dangerous actually makes it safer.

Afterwards I wandered along to a truly awesome indoor lecture. Beneath a gigantic Van Der Graaf generator our lecturer taught us a bit about lightning. He charged up the machine then raised various types of metal rod so that bolts of lightning arced eight to ten feet across the gap to hit them. Why are you safest in a car in a lightning storm? Because you’re on insulating rubber tyres. Wrong! A massive discharge of current was arced across to an innocent car tyre offered up as sacrifice. No, it’s the skin effect. To prove it, our intrepid host climbed into a man-sized metal bird cage and raised it up on a hydraulic jack so that again lightning leaped through the air and crackled down the side of the cage. He was alive, he could even touch the bars – but put them outside and he would be in electrocuted. The answer: lightning tracks across the outside skin of a metal object, so as long as you are not touching the metal bodywork, you are quite safe.

Dining out in America can be a bit hit and miss: the best description of the eating often being that it’s big and simple. If you like seafood however, Boston food is fabulous. At Union Oyster House (a haunt of JFK apparently) we had native oysters on the half shell – which I always like with Guinness rather than white wine. That was followed by delicious clam chowder. On Sunday night we braved the biting winds to get to Legal Sea Food on the harbour side (another local institution). There I tried char – a tasty deep-water fish that looks like trout and tastes like salmon, while my daughter went for a medley of clams, mussels, shrimps and lobster. I tried a little and they were all perfect.

Unlike many other places, Boston downtown is pretty lively with lots of shops. There are places like Macy’s right in the centre, and then a fairly posh area just to the west, with two large malls and lots of boutique shops along the wide and pleasant streets. After the pounding that my shoes had had in the snow I acquired a new pair of Rockports which were very reasonable compared with UK prices.

On Monday we took in the Museum of Fine Arts, which is a magnificent institution lately extended with the Art of the Americas wing designed by our own, our very own Sir Norman Foster. Everyone seemed very impressed by it, although the actual contents were a little shy of the title. Art of the Americas implies stuff from Terra del Fuego to Baffin Island, whereas it is more about the art of white well-to-do Americans down the years. But one mustn’t sneer: the MFA is an exceptional gallery, with room after room of wonderful art that it would takes weeks of viewing to do justice to.

It took a kind invitation to get me back to Boston after a gap of twelve years. Even in the snow it’s an easy city to visit, and the demolition of miles of urban elevated freeway had brought light and humanity back to many streets. I’d certainly recommend a visit – and they’re polite enough not to mention the tea!