Boston Trip Part 4: Red Line to Braintree

My actual time in Boston went far too quickly. Between hanging around the house with Brad and Elaine, messing up our shoulders playing fake baseball on their new Wii, and going to social functions hosted by various professors and colleagues of Brad's, our time for sightseeing pretty much consisted of a few hours on Saturday. And so after spending a few hours trying to come up with a plan for the day, we finally decided to get out and not squander any more time sitting around on our computers.

Like the other trips we made during my last visit over the summer, we took the subway from the Porter station just down the street from their house in towards downtown. In addition to being part of Boston's awesome public transportation network - they have all six major types of transit: heavy rail (subways), light rail (trams), commuter rail (trains), buses, bus rapid transit (BRT), and ferries - Porter Square is noteworthy because as far as I can tell, it has one of the ten longest escalator banks in North America, and probably the second longest outside of the Washington Metro. That's nothing to sneeze at, because WMATA should have long escalators since it has 588 of them - 1.96% of all the escalators in the United States.

As you can probably tell, I've done a fair amount of reading on the subject.

Porter Square's longer escalator bank, leading down from ticketing to the inbound platform.
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I forgot to take a picture of this, but this image is from Wikimedia Commons.

However, perhaps my favorite part of traveling into Boston from Somerville is that you have to take the Red Line, and the trains traveling in that direction along that line are all listed as traveling in the direction of a region south of town called "Braintree." It sounds like a delightful place, mostly because this is all I can think of when I see the name:

And that's saying nothing of other endpoints along the various T lines like Alewife (apparently a type of fish) and Wonderland.

Anyway, we got off at Central Square and walked towards MIT. We ate at a small, oddly shaped grill called Miracle of Science. The coolest thing about the place was that they didn't have actual menus, instead you had to check out a big chalkboard with all their menu items and prices that was set up like the periodic table.

From there, we headed towards town through the MIT campus, eventually turning right and heading south along Massachusetts Avenue, across the Harvard Bridge (past all the Smoot markings!), and into... umm... whatever you call the area immediately southwest of downtown Boston. Is that still Boston? Anyway, compared to the crazy, snowy weather they'd been having so far this year, I was told that I should count myself lucky to have blue skies and temperatures above fifty.

We walked down Boylston Street...

Eventually reaching the Boston Public Library's main branch.

Pretty much the sole purpose of this visit had been to see their main reading room, Bates Hall. The room is fantastic, most notably for its 218' long, 42' wide, 50' high barrel vaulted ceiling and 120 identical green desk lamps. However, it felt really weird to be taking a picture of the room given just how eerily quiet it was considering just how many people were studying inside of it. Even the sound of my shutter seemed to be too much, as you can tell by the fact that I didn't retake the photo in spite of a blurry Brad.

On the way out, we saw a group of people protesting Muammar Gaddafi's rule of Libya. I fully expected him to be out of power by the time I got around to posting this entry, but it's been ten days and there's been no change.

Oh, and we on the way back we stopped at a bar to watch the VT-Duke game in the ACC Tournament, but I won't go into that experience except to say that we had some truly epic loaded fries at the restaurant.

And that mostly covers the sightseeing in Boston. On Sunday we went to a fancy brunch and then dug out some beanbags and played cornhole in their driveway and just generally hung out before it was time for me to pack up and get ready to head south on the next leg of my journey.

Next up will be Boston Trip Part 5: The Biggest Dig, in which you learn more than you ever wanted to know about America's most expensive highway project. Or, more properly, you get to watch me be a big transportation fanboy and just gawk at the bridges and the tunnels and the overpasses and the weaving sections and the signage and the lane markings all the way through Massachusetts and Connecticut.