Beantown Day 3

I spent yesterday attending a poster session of some Geocat colleagues and wandering around Boston. I talked to some guy from Oklahoma about the history of land grabbing and oil booms in his state and I met a kid from Milwaukee who did a project on residential segregation through the auspiced of the McNair program. We had a lot of the same interests. He did Sociology and Geography for undergrad and wants to be an urban planner. Surprisingly he got $0 funding for grad school even though he is a McNair scholar, because urban planning is a professional degree. Thank God I want to do research. I also talked to Nissa Fink, UC Geography grad student/mom extraordinaire about Cairo and neoliberal gentrification. I told her about Walter Armbrust's lecture at the Taft Center last week on some the same issues, told from the perspective of an Oxford Historian. Note to self: Get Nissa hooked up with the email list for the Taft Research Cener's Middle East Studies crap.

After that me and co-Geocats Doug and Eira wandered around downtown Boston and perused some really old shit on the Freedom Trail. The city of Boston has painted a one-foot-wide red line on the sidewalk all over downtown to create a path that tourists can follow that takes one all around the city's historic sites. I didn't realize this, but after reading my Urban Sociology textbook (The Urban Sociology Reader), apparently Boston was one of the places that really initiated much of the impetus and strategies of the historic preservation movement. My cursory understanding is that urbanite Bostonians united beginning in the 20's to protect the fabric of their city's history. I'm not much of a hisory buff when it comes to shit like the American Revolutionary War, but Boston really has a ton of historically important shit going on in that category. And apparently that has always been a point of local pride. Bostonians have long been cultivating a love and protection of what makes their city special.

The other thing that is becoming apparent to me is that hordes of interchangably identical (and very middle-class-looking) undergradute-age hispter kids are ubiquitous here. I have never seen so many of them! And they are all the same age and apparently have the same fashion inspiration. I would like to see what neighborhoods they frequent in order to have a comparison with Cincinnati. I commented on this phenomena to Doug and Eira and Eira said something about 'trustafarians' - a new word to me, as I have only met a few trust fund kids and soon learned to avoid them like the plague because they made me want to break shit. Given that Boston is home to the likes of MIT, Harvard, Berklee, and some 80-odd other colleges it would seem likely that a disproportionately high number of trustafairan/priveledged hipster kids would congregate here.

We ate some good Mexican food last night at a restaurant that had a sign on the door banning hoodies. I was wearing mine, but I guess they figured I was more likely to break into some Lawrence Welk shit than to stab somebody. Now that I think about it, that is probably true. I ended up having to translate for our waitress because her English was rather spotty. I accidentaly brought a Spanish-English dictionary to Boston, but there are so many immigrants here I may end up needing it.

I wish Cincinnati had a subway. Trains are awesome. And there is some really good graffiti around the T, as the system is known locally. I have been trying to get pictures, but my photography stealth is severely out of practice, and I don't really like the camera that I borrowed from the UC library.

More later. Peace out.