Laura goes to the US

Boston

last weekend we took all our free time we could find, threw it into a big box, stirred it and went to Boston. WE are nine Siemens interns - 8 germans and one hungarian girl who´s married to a german. nine makes 2 cars and 2 hotel rooms. five had to go through the backdoor and one guy had to sleep on that thing that is underneath the matress of an American double bed. where all the springs come out :) (we thought, there was a couch in the rooms...) on Friday night we all left office early and off we were. (which doesn´t mean i did not have to wait for hours ;)) it´s a 4-5 hours drive plus breaks for diner and little boys.
Boston is a very nice city and if you are just coming from new york city it´s very small, neat and cozy. there is a lot of space for pedestrians, the houses are quite small - around 10 to 15 floors - , everything goes slowly. that was the point i realised it will take me a while to get used to a city like karlsruhe again... nice, small, some cultural events, but one at a time. nevertheless, i like nyc better than boston. it´s just a different feeling.
the most remarkable thing was the weather... on saturday we walked along the freedom trail which connects all big monuments and took us through central town. it was freezing (around 2C) and after a while it started snowing. the official first day of christmas season :) it was so much snow we went to a big mall just to be inside. there i got a pretty shirt i will wear at the opera next week (i´ll tell you later). on sunday, we had perfect weather! just about 18C, clear and sunshine!!! I´ve never experienced a difference of over 15C within one day!!! so cambridge and harvard glanced in all its glory of old centuries...
one thing about massachusets is that the state law is very strict... our planned saturday night bar trip with live music ended very fast when we realised we as foreigners need our actual passport to drink something. no other ID is enough. and of course most of our passports were in New Jersey (where you by the way don´t need them to get into a bar). but the fines are very high (100000$). so we had a little party in the guys´ hotel room.
we also found out that traffic penalties are not that cheap... we turned left on a street where we were not supposed to do so (there was a special u-turn area we didn´t see). bad luck a police officer saw us... of course we had to stop just in front of the others that had left some time before us... so somewhere there is also a picture existing. the fine was 200$ (!!!!) but lucky us we somehow made it not to be forced to pay.

posted by Laura @ 6:15 PM