Charles MGH

charles/mgh, thats the name of the subway stop where i took this picture. thinking of it, it might well be the only stop that looks kind of modern in entire boston. at least of the ones that i have seen. actually, its only the glass cage that leads you to the platform thats modern... 

charles is for the charles river that you will cross when taking the outbound train to cambridge. mgh is for massachusetts general hospital that you will see on your left when taking the inbound train into boston. ofcourse, there is a wikipedia page for this red line stop. however much i love wikipedia, i never felt the urge to contribute to it myself, and often wonder how/when and whom decides its time to make an entry about certain things. but... it did tell me that the bridge that you are on when crossing the charles with the red line is named the longfellow bridge. i kind of knew that, reading it. what i didnt know, is that this bridge is also called the salt-and-pepper-(shaker)-bridge (shaker is apparently optional). this is because of the shape of the central towers on the bridge. hmm... we crossed this bridge several times by foot, yet i never thought, hey, those look like salt and pepper shakers! so... one day i have to go back and picture them, so that you can tell me what you think... :)

Catching shadows

sometimes its hard to be objective about the photos i take (or always?). here i clearly see the man pulling forward his cart with all those empty bottles and cans, and i like it.... but then i wonder... do others see that as well? now i really dont know whether thats a clear shadow of a man pulling a cart or not.... it was really sunny, as you can see, but it was quite windy and chilly.

anyways... here almost all bottles and cans (even small soda cans) have a deposit. most people dont bother to return them, so there are other people collecting them from wherever they find them. just in the corner you can see a part of a second cart as packed with refundable bottles as this one. we were on the perfectly fine sidewalk; i dont know why he choose to walk on the street... this is close to south station, where we got off yesterday to have a nice walk around a part of boston we dont visit very often. walking on leads you eventually to the ICA (institute of contemporary art) and from there we walked along the shore back to the center of boston where we found Panera already closed at 4 pm!! bugh, the financial district is really empty on a sunday afternoon....

Marching on

yet another picture from the st paddy's parade (someone asked us on saturday for directions to the parade and then wished us "happy st paddy's day!"). it is held in boston since 1804, and in new york they do it since 1762, the longest running parade in the US.

the sun made for nice shadows and i tried many time to catch that; mostly not very successfull (the policeman was in the way.... :D). i liked this one, although i dont remember who these men were. surely they looked all very different, but their shadows are alike....

i read somewhere that nearly 600,000 people gathered for the parade, and the newspaper told me this morning that 363 citations were issued by the police and 11 people got actually arrested for the following reasons: "Charges included assault and battery, disorderly conduct, affray, indecent exposure, and resisting arrest". my goodness! i just was googling around a little more, and ended up at bpdnews.com (boston police department), here they have listed with full name and age who got arrested on sunday. i think thats ridiculous....