A couple of the ACF guys recently went up to Boston to spend a long weekend. I didn’t want to take a day off of work, so I traveled separately, hitching a ride up from New Jersey on Friday evening with Jerry, Melanie, and Melissa. (Thanks Jerry and Melanie for doing most of the driving!) This meant that I really only had one day in Boston to hang out with people, so I had to be quite efficient about cramming people in on Saturday. I basically didn’t have any time for sightseeing, which was honestly fine by me.1
I started Saturday off by meeting up with Adithya (a notable biology guru) and Karena (also a notable biology guru) at a fun cafe in Cambridge. Adithya then gave us a brief house tour, and then I had the immense privilege of touring the offices of the prestigious Nabla Bio, where, as a software engineer, I was greatly intimidated by all the fancy lab equipment.
We then walked over to Harvard Square to raid the local Patagonia store for free stickers—the Cambridge store has its own design with a flying turkey (???) on it. In order to secure my granola credentials, I’ve been considering putting some stickers on my Nalgene bottle, so it was important for me to stock up on outdoorsy stickers.
Our lunch was a brief and tragic affair in Harvard Square. I call it tragic because I learned a sad and terrible fact: Adithya actually comes to New York every few weeks without telling me! I now sympathize with Karena, knowing what it’s like to have Adithya avoid you.
After this mournful meal, I said goodbye to them and proceeded to Newbury Street, where I met up with Jerry, Alex, Emily, Melanie, Melissa, Alice, and Fatima at Chicha San Chen, a recently-opened and very popular bubble tea shop. (I recall the New York location used to be all the rage in Chinatown, before Molly Tea opened up and stole its thunder.) We did a tea tasting comparing different levels of roasting the leaves, which was pretty cool; you could definitely see and taste the difference between the different cups of tea. We then hung around some plaza with meerkat statues, before Alex showed us how to “sneak” into the fancy bathrooms at the Mandarin Oriental hotel.
Having relieved myself, I then walked over to MIT to see Li Chao, with whom I walked over to yet another tea shop in Cambridge. We had an interesting discussion about Christianity and money, which we continued during our stroll back over the Charles River to Brookline to grab dinner with Evan, Ricky, Edwin, Michael, Josh, Sam, Joie, Matt, and John.
Dinner was a near-disaster, as the restaurant wouldn’t seat us until our entire party arrived, but one of us2 was arriving forty-five minutes late, by which time we wouldn’t be able to reasonably finish a meal within our allotted time slot. So we had to pivot to a hastily-conceived fallback plan: we went to a nearby food hall instead. For a last-minute backup, this actually wasn’t too bad; we then spent the rest of the night at a dessert place and an arcade.
On Sunday, we attended the first service at Hope Fellowship Church, where we got to chat briefly with fellow CMU alumni Matt and Jeremy afterward. We unfortunately couldn’t find Shanice before we had to head out to rush to another service, at the Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston. After that service, we went to a Chinese restaurant named Mu Lan for lunch. I suspect this is one of Evan’s go-to places, because he also brought me to Mu Lan a few years ago when we visited Boston together on spring break.
Finally, after lunch and a brief excursion to yet another tea shop, it was time to head back to New York. This was not without its own mishaps; there was a bit of a miscommunication with Jerry, who thought I was at the Cambridge location of Mu Lan when in fact I was thirty minutes away, at the Waltham location. I didn’t mind waiting, as the weather was nice and I had brought a book, although I guess I must have looked quite sad sitting all alone at the curb reading Karl Barth, because a man came up to me to ask if I was okay. I assured him that I was just waiting for my friends to pick me up.
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