Zack Mahdavi's Blog

Although I haven’t been putting them up on my blog, I’ve taken several more pictures of the Boston area, and they are up on my Flickr page. Here’s a quick run-through:

Boston Aquarium

The aquarium was pretty cool, although it was small compared to the aquarium Maria and I saw in Monterey. Regardless, it was a very cool to see the penguins.

Institute of Contemporary Art

The ICA is in a brand new building, so the style was, well, contemporary! The actual exhibit portion is small: I walked through the entire thing in less than an hour. What was more exciting was the actual architecture of the building: the exhibits are placed on the fourth floor, and you take a giant glass elevator (about the size of my dorm room at UT) up to that floor.

JFK Presidential Library and Museum

This museum was very interesting, although I had already heard most of what was mentioned at The Sixth Floor Museum (from where Kennedy was shot) in Dallas.

MIT

It felt good to be at MIT… For some reason, I felt like I was at home, surrounded by engineers. The museum was awesome, so check out the Flickr pics for some of the museum contraptions.

Random Boston strolls

Oh, and this bridge just looks amazing!

I finished my first year of medical school a week ago.. what a relief. Now I’m in Boston. I’ll be here for about 2 months doing research, so if you happen to be in the area, let me know.

Yesterday, I took the subway into downtown, with the intention to go on the Freedom Trail. However, everything around me was so new that I got distracted and gave up on following the signs for the trail. Instead, I just ended up walking around Boston taking pictures of stuff I found interesting.

I arrived at the Boston Public Garden. What a sight to see: the place was loaded with the greenest grass I’ve ever seen in my life, immense flowering trees, tons of flowers everywhere, and an insane amount of people walking the gardens.

Another really beautiful area was the Boston Common Park. This park was loaded with people walking their dogs, reading books, playing softball, jogging, etc. It was built in 1634, and is considered the oldest public park in the United States.

It’s really interesting to see how active people are in Boston. Very few people drive since the roads are terrible: instead, every part of Boston is loaded with pedestrians.

The weather so far has been great. Highs are in the 60s, with the lows being in the upper 40s. In other words, I avoid going out in the morning.

People in Boston are also very politically active; I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t follow the news or politics. This is also apparent on the streets. For example, when I was waiting for the subway to get into the city, these guys were dressed as storm troopers handing out flyers for some political event. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on that side of the road to see what they were campaigning for.

In a past post about Galveston, I mentioned how it was amazing how much of the history of Galveston has been saved in the timeframe of about 100 years. Houston and Dallas don’t have many of their original buildings still standing in downtown, and that’s likely due to the mentality of Texans: why save it when you can build something bigger and better? This thinking is the polar opposite of Boston. In Boston, every street corner is loaded with old buildings such as The Boston Public Library (built 1848). Also, every building tends to have its own unique architecture, which really reflects the historical diversity of the city.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying Boston. All of the pics I have taken of Boston so far are here.