Where: Boston, MA

When: Mid November

Duration: 3 days

Activities: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Quincy Market; part of the Freedom Trail  – Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere House, Old North Church, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, USS Constitution, Bunker Hill Monument; MIT Museum

Tips:
*Bundle up (learnt the hard way)
*Wear sensible shoes and prepare for a lot of walking

Boston was a lot of firsts for me. It was the first time I had explored a city by myself (albeit only for a few hours), dined in a restaurant alone, uber’d a ride, heard the phrase “uber’d a ride” and walked a lot in the biting cold. I still clearly remember walking to the Isabella Stewart Museum from the hotel, wiping tears off my eyes and feeling the cold wind burn through my skin. Being from Chennai (India) and Houston, I always tend to think that the cold can’t hurt me as much as the heat. And every time I visit a cold place, I am proved wrong. Well, some people never learn!

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was unlike any museum I’ve visited before. It is one woman’s vision – both the art collection as well as the way they are displayed. She made sure the art display would stay exactly the way she had exhibited it through her will. Part of the museum experience was figuring out why she had placed things the way she did. It took me a while to realize that the only way to truly experience the museum was to understand the feeling each room evoked as a whole rather than look at each piece of art individually. I walked through the entire museum again with this new perspective. The most stunning part of the museum was not any piece of art but the central courtyard.  The sweet smell of chrysanthemums, Venetian style architecture, and sun light streaming in through the glass roof conjured a very surreal effect. I stayed there for a while until my stomach signaled lunch time and headed off to Quincy Market.

The rest of the trip was spent  eating, drinking, shopping and walking the Freedom Trail. On the last day of the trip, we (my husband had joined me by then) were strolling through Cambridge when we happened to enter the MIT museum. We ended up spending a lot more time there than we had anticipated. The insight into some of MIT’s research and the exhibitions on contemporary holography and kinetic art were particularly engaging. The flight back home involved discussions around the possibilities of incorporating some of what we had seen in our future Tony Starkish home.