New England Area, MIT and a Sandwich

First day in the Boston area was pretty nice. I got up to a rather gloomy day, it was cloudy and drizzling. I took off to work. The highways are nice and wide like in California, but the one thing that strikes you is both sides of the road are really GREEN! Well, I thought California was green when I went there, but this is oh definitely a lot greener, I realized that even when I was peering out of the flight window! Anyways, got to the office ok (I had done a dry run last evening just to make sure). Met a bunch of people and learnt quite a bit about how the sales force works. My manager actually asked me to leave early in the afternoon itself so that I could get acclimatized! :-)

I gladly drove back to the hotel. Left all the stuff, armed myself with a bunch of maps and took off. I followed his advice and decided not to drive into the city. I wanted to go look around MIT. So I parked the car at the station and took The T (underground train system) to MIT. Boston is called "The Walking City". You can apparently walk all over the city. It really is nice. MIT is a lot different from U of M in that it is very much IN the city. There's no small town feeling here. But you can still feel the student population around you...people in bikes, roller blades etc. And some of the buildings are great...there is a lot of history here (although I don't know much of it!). I walked down Massachusetts Ave to the Charles River. Crossed the river on the Harvard bridge gazing at the pretty view of the downtown buildings. Walked back to the T station. Oh and of course, I saw a tamil mama and mami taking a walk with their grandchild in a stroller, conversing in tamil!! :-) Hopped back onto the convenient and moderately priced T. You do get the feeling of being in an intellectual place. I was a little skeptical about getting that feeling when my friend was telling me about it but today I realized what that meant. For one thing, everyone on the train was reading something...everyone! I even saw one American girl with "A Suitable Boy" (Vikram Seth)! Well, I guess it's not uncommon to read on trains, but still...there's the feeling.

I picked the car up and drove the back. Bought what turned out to be an awesome sandwich from this bread place and also some general groceries and returned to the hotel. There's apparently lots of places to see around here. Let's see how much I can get done! :-) The dial-up connection is not too bad here, don't know how often I can keep updating this though....

So long folks!