Pictures from Boston

Like driving in Boston, much of the sidewalks in the neighborhood were red brick, impractical, old, and charming. I finally must be a Midwesterner: how do they shovel snow in winter?

The light had a different cast to it. Somehow more clear and bright than the light at home. And more red brick. We get so much siding and wood and so little brick where I live. I miss the look of brick buildings.

The Ware glass flower collection at the Museum of Natural History at Harvard. This is the way a museum should look. No interactive doodads, no blinking lights. Quiet, lots of wooden cases, labels that suggest that the world is an orderly place.

These glass flowers, grasses, and cross sections of pistals, stamens, and so on substituted for the real thing for students studying botany at Harvard at the turn of the nineteenth century. Handmade by two glass blowers, a father and son from Germany, and paid for by a wealthy American woman and donated to Harvard. The lighting is low, and there are many signs that warn you not to lean on the case or place anything on it. The flowers, over 100 years old, are delaminating and cracking.



Only in Boston: a bookcase factory outlet. Boston is a book lover's heaven. There are a million different bookstores with a million different genres. The only thing more frequent than restaurants, as we walked about, were bookstores.

Moody's Falafel Palace.

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