Without any doubt, Boston is a young-feeling and sophisticated city, judging by its nature of being the home of world’s many prestigious colleges and universities: Harvard, MIT and Boston College to name a few. I’m back in Boston again to continue on with our landscape studio’s project site observation of the Parcel 18 Big Dig. Arrived in Boston Chinatown with a four-hour bus ride from NYC Chinatown, I weaved my way through familiar streetscape of Boston to meet up with Adam at the Central Fraternity Office in Lewis Wharf. After depositing my bags at the CFO, I took off f [View Full Entry]

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Crossing over the Hudson via Brooklyn Bridge to Heather’s place in Brooklyn, I looked out from our subway car window over our shoulders and saw the illuminated Manhattan skylines behind us. Ah, we are in New York City again. Beau and I landed in Lombardia this evening from a rough plane ride and we managed to figure out how to ride the subway to Brooklyn, where we will be staying for the next few days. The NYC subway is a very extensive system, with $21 for a five-day pass. This should be an exciting adventure in the Big Apple, as always. [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, February 4, 2004 - Boston, Massachusetts After a layover in Chicago O’Hare from Des Moines, Iowa airport, we finally set a foot in Boston’s Logan Airport. Several people from the studio decided to approach Downtown in style by the classic Boston Harbor ferry, but we decided to ride a quicker way of Boston’s famous and efficient subway system, the ‘T’. The Red Line brought us to City of Cambridge, north of downtown Boston, and we checked into our room at the Radisson Cambridge, several blocks away from the main M.I.T. campus. We wil [View Full Entry]

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Iowa could be harsh in the winter. This is what I like to do: waking up in the morning around 4am, going to the Campus Services HQ, and helping out the full timer to clean out the snow off sidewalks and stairs. What can I say? I am a winter guy. [View Full Entry]

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After arrived in Paris main train station from Brussels and then the d’Artagnan Hostel (luckily, we still got our reservations at the fully booked hostel), we took off around 8:30 pm for dinner around the Champs-Elysées, where the Eiffel Tower is. To get there, we need to transfer the Metro twice, and it took us more than an hour just to get to the area. Our hostel is located in the East Paris, and the Eiffel tower is, of course, on the west side of Paris. We were hoping to find an inexpensive restaurant around the area at this hour. First [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - Brussels, Belgium What’s up with Europe and pickpocket? This is my third personal encounter with pickpockets through our backpack journey in Europe. Ko Sing drove us to Zaandam Centraal around 7:20am to catch a train to Brussels via Amsterdam. When our 8:23am train finally arrived in Amsterdam Centraal platform, we were boarding the second class passenger car in order: Jason and Ryan stood in front of me, making me an easy target for thieves, as my backpack hanging loosely behind my back without anybody worthy keeping an eye on it. My [View Full Entry]

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Well, tell you what. I have relatives in the Netherlands, and this trip is a good opportunity to reconnect with my other side of family. Dad is the youngest of all seven kids; Grandpa and my oldest uncle were killed in the 1940s during Japanese occupation when dad was three years old. Twako (lit. means “the oldest aunt” in Chinese Fujian dialek) is the oldest sibling, and she took care of the rest of the kids, and she naturally became a second mother for my dad. During the Indonesian revolution in 1960s, she, along with another aunt, immigrated to the Netherlands [View Full Entry]

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Ich bin ein Berliner -JFK, 1963. (A famous speech: ‘I am a jelly donut’ by President John F. Kennedy while visiting Berlin in 1963. We’re pretty sure what he meant was ‘I am a Berliner’, referring to a person from Berlin. ‘Berliner’ is a German word for ‘jelly donut’.) Wednesday, August 6, 2003 Berlin, Germany: a surviving city Brandenburger Tor, or the Brandenburg Gate, is no doubt an ideal place to start our Berlin adventure. This gate has etched many significant Berliner (and thus, Germa [View Full Entry]

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One can tell whether he’s in an Eastern European country by riding the train. In contrast to its western counterpart, trains from Nürnberg in Germany to Prague is an older train with no air conditioner; although there was no delay or major problems, you can tell that they could replace the rails so that the ride would be a smoother, efficient, and faster one. At least this is what I think. The six hour Czech train ride turned out to be an interesting one. Immigration takes place on the train, with two sets of immigration officers screening through the train completely. [View Full Entry]

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Although Zurich was a good start to assimilate our Italian customary into German, entering Germany via Austria is a different story. Flash back at the statas a couple month prior our European trip, we purchased our six-day Eurorail tickets that only allow us to visit five countries: Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Benelux (Belgium/the Netherlands/Luxembourg), and France. The most direct route from Zürich to München is passing around a lake which borders Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, thus we need to enter Austria, one of the countries NOT listed on our tickets. We don't have any other [View Full Entry]

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