Tea Party

Day 8.

I woke up cold. The window was open a bit because the A/C unit didn’t fit perfectly and the late September morning was not kind to us. We had only been given one thin blanket (each of course) and it just wasn’t enough for anyone except Q who seemed to have discarded hers in the night. In fact, all her sheets were in disarray and she was pretty much sleeping on the bare plastic mattress.

It took forever to get everyone up. As per usual, Amy was first up with sus and me fighting for next in the shower-room. Eventually, I found myself grabbing a cup of tea (Lipton, ugh, with water well below boiling) in the lobby and looking at all the notices including one that boasted that John Lennon had stayed there. A man in a comfy chair tapping at his laptop asked if I was looking for anything. “Oh no, just waiting for my tea to brew,” I replied and then found myself talking to this guy for about an hour. He was studying (mature student) computational biology so there was plenty to talk about within that subject, my own and the unfortunate politics in science. I didn’t quite know whether I wanted to be talking to him or not as on the one hand it was the first intelligent conversation I had had all week and on the other hand… it was the first intelligent conversation I had had all week and who wants that when they are on holiday? So I was kind of glad when finally Q emerged. Everyone gathered and we followed the recommendation of the hostel to go to Dempsey’s for breakfast.

Dempsey’s felt like the traditional breakfast diner place you see in all the movies. It had U-shaped tables large enough for about 15 people with us seated on red-topped swivel-stools. Remarkably, we found just enough seats for us all in this popular joint (though we may have had to ask some of the friendly locals to move a couple of seats). The waitress took our order and showed the typical interest in where we were all from. I had a bagel with egg and a sausage patty inside (and of course tea- Tetley this time) while other people had pancakes or French Toast… and sus decided that she wanted pancakes and potatoes and bacon and egg and toast and sausages. She didn’t quite finish.

Replete, we were on our way. We caught the bus and then the T to Downtown Crossing. We were to meet with Miraba (Lisa) and Emano (Christine- I had never met a Christine before) at twelve thirty and we made it into Boston by eleven so there was plenty of time to shop first. I waved people towards Filene’s Basement if they wanted cheap clothes and otherwise left them to their own devices. I gestured to Amy where I thought Barnes and Noble was in case she wanted to find me later before I left everyone to go off on my own.

My first port of call was my favourite CD shop (second hand and with a vast collection of soundtracks). I surprised myself by remembering the street it was on. Or used to be on for there was nought but empty shelves and a sign on the door that said “moved to Newbury Street”. I repressed my grief and moved onto Brattle Bookshop which I discovered way back in the last century on my first trip to Boston. I carried around my bag from there for ages until it got ripped; it was the perfect size for taking a book to a coffee shop or pack of cards to a friend. Fond memories aside, the shop didn’t have the best selection of second-hand books ever. The most interesting book I found was by Gyles Brandreth, enticingly titled “Joy of Lex”.

There was only so much time I could kill shopping. I thought to wander around the cemetery next to Boston Common. Alas, all the graves were old and if there had been any vampiric activity it was done and dusted centuries ago. I do love the way they carved skulls onto the gravestones in those days. Flying skulls, not your everyday kind that just roll. These had wings. I am not sure if there were any of the later kind here, but in my tours of Boston graveyards I noticed that at one point someone must have said “wait, isn’t this a bit overly morbid?” and they started carving babies’ faces with the wings instead of skulls. The juxtaposition of the old gravestones with the skulls and the slightly less old gravestones with the babies only makes it creepier to me.

After my trip to the cemetery, I tried to go to Barnes and Noble only to find another dead shop with empty shelves. Frustrated, I went to find other people. Q and Em were in Filene’s Basement looking and the cheap man-jeans. Em complained to me that though she had tried to buy a bra, the changing rooms were communal and she had to run away. I wandered the two floors desperately seeking anything in my size, veering with horror from some of the sections and not even finding anything in the petites. I left Filene’s and wondered what to do next.

I just lurked at the designated meeting space. It wasn’t long until daisy came by and then the rest of the contingent. Biped was squirming over a bag she had seen in Macy’s. Not just any bag, but the perfect bag and the only bag there of its kind. And also totally lacking in a price tag. We sent her back to put her mind at ease and not too many minutes later she returned with the bag and a huge grin saying that they let her have it for the lowest price of any bag on the rack. We inquired what that was and she replied some number ten times what I would pay for something to merely carry things in. But she was happy and we played with its tassles.

We went together to the common where we were to meet the Massachusetts Hobblings. There was some sort of subdued fair going on where everyone at it wore t-shirts and stood around looking bored. Fortunately there were also balloons for us to enjoy. We stood under a large balloon arch and posed for pictures until some people, looking in disapproval at how unbored we were, moved the arch elsewhere. We walked to the Boylston corner of the park and laughed at all the balloons that had escaped and were polka dotting the sky.

We sat on benches near the T station and waited a short while for us to be joined by our three guests. It had taken a week but finally we were in the habit of getting to places early rather than late. We were found by Christine and her daughter Liz first and Lisa soon after. It actually felt odd to meet new people after a week of seeing the same people every day. The seven of us had got into the habit of communicating with a system of pokes and by occasionally sitting on each other. Having to re-enter the more civilised world of conversation was tough.

I caught up with Lisa on the walk to our restaurant for lunch. I hadn’t seen her since the Hobbling Meet in London the summer of 2003 (the first Meet of more than three people). It was the hottest day of the year and people paddled in Trafalgar Square fountains. She told me how she had got into publishing now and was moving away from Boston with her boyfriend while she lead us with a fast pace to the Japanese restaurant.

We were seated at a bench which isn’t the best arrangement for a group of people. I made it clear that I thought others should get to know Lisa as I had met with her quite a few times in my year in Boston. The table went me, sus, daisy, Amy and Lisa and then insignificant people and then Christine and Liz. Poor Liz sat at the end looking totally isolated and bored by everything but no one wanted to force her to jump into the group if she didn’t want to. At this point I wish to mention the oddity that was a television in a Japanese restaurant. There had been a few in the Sport’s Bar of the night before but that was to be expected (as the only sport related thing in it was what was being broadcast). Seeing one in the restaurant felt most out of place.

The meal was just as I remembered it to be: more fun than tasty. The dishes were served raw and we boiled it in broth in our personal pot which was on a hotplate below the surface of the table top. I had beef and lamb as well as the standard plate of tofu, lettuce, rice noodles, mushroom and sweet corn. A bowl of udon noodles made this meal too much to get through (but that just meant I could afford to leave the tofu untouched).

I tried to spend some time at the end of the meal talking to Christine. I can’t remember what about but I am sure it was scintillating. At some point I asked to see her socks that she knitted herself. They looked like good socks.

Once out of the restaurant, we went to an Asian supermarket nearby. Em bought all the Pocky in the shop while Q didn’t trust my mochi identification ability and so left mochiless. Outside, Em shared the Pocky around and we all agreed, save her, that it was nasty.

Lisa showed us where the Charles Playhouse was for those that were going there later that day to see the Blue Man Group. Once orientated, we left for a short walk through some of Boston. We went back through the common, pausing at the New State House. Charity called me and I passed my phone around letting everyone talk to her (and hopefully they all said their thanks for being our token local in New York). Once the phone call was over, we went passed the cemetery, King’s Chapel (slightly less impressive than the one in Cambridge but some were overwhelmed with how old it was having been built in the mid-eighteenth century…) and ended up at the Old South Meeting House. The pace set by Lisa was a little too fast to take in the sights properly but with such a large group it is hard to choose a pace that suits everyone. People seemed to be a bit lost in the whirlwind tour but most knew that they had the opportunity to return another day. I wanted to explore the thrills of Quincy Market and see the street performers but I couldn’t argue when consensus became to go to my favourite place in the area- Harvard Square (Cambridge). Nearly all of us purchased tea in Tealuxe and took it to drink outside on a small triangle of grass. Lisa went into an expensive chocolate shop to buy some tasty morsels that cost their weight in gold while we sipped our brews. Sus displayed her tea-inexperience by leaving the tea bag in for about fifteen minutes before I screamed at her to take it out but apparently she enjoyed the first sip enough to return to Tealuxe and buy some leaves to take home. My tea was, of course, gorgeous. Tangerine white. Lisa returned chocolate-less as she couldn’t find the end of the incredibly long queue in the shop and we all chatted. When the overseas travellers started passing around their horrendous passport photos (I thought sus’ was bad until I saw Amy’s) even Liz had to raise a smile.

Then we hit two comic book shops. In the first I bought the Civil War Files in the hope that I’d be able to follow the actions of some of the minor Marvel characters. In the second, I found Stan Lee Meets Spider-man. We lost Christine and Liz in between comic shops as they had to travel to get home. It was a shame they missed the second comic shop as then they could have witnessed some rather extreme Angel fans go nuts over Smile Time puppet Angel (vamp form) on sale for $50.

After that, we split up even further. Q, Em, biped and daisy were off to see the Blue Man Group (something I shunned as I had seen it before, Amy shunned for reasons only a Trekkie seems to follow and sus for reasons unknown to me but possibly because the others booked tickets without asking whether she wanted one first). We remaining four chatted at the entrance to Harvard Square T about books, Lisa brightening up for the first time. She said that she’d hang around if we wanted to talk more about books with her but otherwise would go home as she had things to do. Obviously, having done the talking about books thing to death in our everyday Internet lives, we regrettably informed her that we couldn’t do that and we parted company. I dragged sus and Amy to yet another bookshop. Just outside there was a table of second-hand books and I made sus buy “The Left Hand of Darkness”, shocked that such an important scifi book had slipped passed her. The bookshop I took them to had a basement full of second hand books and an excellent selection of scifi. In fact, I had done most of my book shopping here all those years ago particularly with getting old Spider-man books. I bought one of the Essential collections of old issues and I thought I also bought a Jonathan Carroll but that book seems to have got lost in transit.

Then I directed them along a route that I walked often while I lived in the area. Normally I walked it in snow up to my knees letting nothing deter me from getting to Harvard Square to buy my comic fix. I actually found that I didn’t recognise much. It was a straight route, however, so it was no problem to get to Central Square. Pika was just down the street from Central. About ten minutes walk (in the knee-deep snow), but I was not going to visit as I don’t know anyone that lives there anymore. I thought that I would take Amy and sus to a Caribbean restaurant that I knew for variety but as we neared Central we all began to yearn for curry. As we walked, I pointed out such highlights as "the place I bought my wine" (once I turned 21 of course) and "the Starbucks where I read lots of Spidey comics". I mulled over the fact that had I never gone to America and chosen to live in this strange hippy commune called pika, I would never have found the cupboard of comics and grown quite so Spidey-obsessed. Only some-what obsessed. At the very least, I would probably be a thousand dollars richer. We talked briefly about what events in our lives had made us what we were.

We picked an Indian out of the many present in the area by the way it was the only one to have any customers. We ordered and chatted and laughed and observed the presence of a television screen. We also discovered that our handwriting was all disturbingly similar. I made a mistake in asking for a mild curry as this restaurant seemed to interpret that as spiceless but overall it was a very nice meal. As my final meal of the Hobbling Holiday, it was great. The night before had been a nice group dinner and this night was with the two friends I was closest to. And I had a mango lassi. Mango lassi makes everything good.

The evening still being young, we didn’t take the T at Central and instead walked to Kendall, a walk that took us on the so-called nostalgia tour around MIT. I showed them the outside to the Student Center and pointed out where the scifi library was but no one wanted to go in (possibly there had been enough books for one day). We passed the gym that I never used to see the Space Waffle from a distance. Officially Simmons Hall, the Space Waffle is the newest dorm building on campus and it is like marmite in that you either love it or you hate it. I fall into the loving category as the different colours to the window frames and the randomly removed segments of building are just so much fun. Next up, was a stroll down the Infinite Corridor grabbing a copy of the student paper, The Tech, in lobby 7 (which was as boring as ever) and discovering that the doors in lobby 10 to Killian Court were locked depriving us of seeing the famous shot of MIT’s columns and also Boston across the Charles River at night. I advised Amy and sus to go back there but I doubt that they did. At the end of the Infinite, we exited back into the cool evening. I showed them my favourite little MIT oddity: the concrete benches in semicircles. I made a confused sus and Amy stand in a certain place and speak. Their surprise when their voices seemed amplified amused me greatly. There were two such benches and, once we scared a student from sitting on one of them, we tried the other with some evil laughs. My two more musically orientated friends declared the pitch to be different (discuss) and one of the semicircles to be more evil than the other. I was pleased to find people as delighted by this as I was. My family just looked at me as if I was mad. After this, all that was left was Kendall T. We didn’t have long enough to get the music to play (we needed to move a handle back and forth to hit a resonance and increase the amplitude of swinging hammers that would then hit pipes) but the people on the other side of the platform were playing their set so Amy and sus got to see it work.

We did the standard trip back to Everett. Once at the hostel, Amy and I got the cards out and taught “quiche” to sus. There was much giggling (though I can’t remember what about but it was probably at sus’ expense) and somehow we managed to get the obligatory Mallory Towers conversation started. We made Q’s bed for her and discovered that it was indeed tricky as the mattress was too narrow and too long for the fitted sheet. Finally done, we took it in turns to prepare for bed in the shower-room. I read some of Stan Lee Meets and was giggling like crazy at the Joss Whedon story, shaking the bed for sus above me. Q came in as we were settling down to sleep and borrowed Amy’s torch to aid her in getting from the bathroom to the bunk with the light off.