In the past two years my blog's vitality has fallen to the bare limit of what one can call alive. Much of this can be attributed to my job as a researcher that requires most of my work to remain unpublished (until done so in a proper scientific journal), and a small part to my laziness. As another effort to revive my online activity, I have decided to write a few posts about my first real vacation in two years ... a trip to USA, more accurately to Boston, Washington DC and New York. I am traveling with my friend, Vida, who, prior to this trip spent two months working in a hospital in Houston (as far as I understand it was mostly slicing people open ... but then again I am just a computer scientist).

First stop of our "North-Eastern USA trip" was the city of Boston, Massachusetts widely acknowledged as a city with semi-European atmosphere Boston provided a good acclimatization gateway for a crowd-hating person like me before hitting a Babylonian place like New York. Sitting on a train to DC, I wish to point out a few highlights of the five days that we spent there:

The Hostel

We stayed in HI Boston hostel, that was in a way very cozy and in a way dangerously close to some major disaster involving leaking pipes and collapsing floor due to moisture in it. Free breakfast buffet and free wireless ... well almost free wireless ... it costs you some of your nerves that you lose when trying to connect to the network. It is really interesting to see how the backpacking culture evolved in the last couple of years ... nowadays everybody is traveling with a laptop. Of course hostels offering the free wireless access have not adapted to this trend and in our case that resulted in about 30 people, apparently have nothing better to do from 5PM on, all trying to connect to, what my guess would be is a domestic class access point. Like you can not do that at home.

The freedom trail

A red line leading tourists through the city center provides a nice no-brain-required way of seeing almost all of the major historical sights of Boston. Just follow the line ... for four hours. The tour offers a mixture of everything: some churches, some monuments, graveyards, and even a ship.

More to come in the next post ... (yes, by now you must have figured out my plan ... I am going to split everything into more posts so that my blog will look more alive ... bwahaha!)