Bread with hagelslag as breakfast and cycling to Harvard

by Edwin

This morning I had breakfast with the guy I’m staying with these days and he happened to be Dutch too. He lives for a couple of years in the US and surprised me this morning with hagelslag (typical Dutch, if you don’t know: just google it) on bread for breakfast 🙂

After having breakfast together he had to go to his work and lend me a bike, which I’m really happy with. After many days of walking half marathons through New York it’s a nice change to go biking through Boston.

I first went to the harbor of Boston which has huge yaughts laying there. Boston really is a lot smaller than New York. Although it has about 800.000 people living here, after a couple of days in New York it feels like a village. Boston still has a couple of skyscrapers, but Cambridge which is on the other side of the river doesn’t and feels like a small village even more.

One of the must-sees of Cambridge for me was of course the Harvard University. Surrounded by schoolbuildings there is a small park in the middle of the campus with a lot of colorful chairs. It’s nice to hang out there for a while and look at all the people crossing. Besides all the tourists obviously there are a lot of students crossing and also chilling in the park. This place really breathes knowledge. It makes you almost feel smart by just chilling in the harvard park 😉

Across the street there were some old guys playing chess for money. They didn’t play that well so I tried a few games, but for some kind of reason they manage it very well to put you under such pressure that you start to make mistakes. There were clocks and you had five minutes of playtime. Although I’m a quite fast player, five minutes was really short. Unfortunately I didn’t win, but I had a nice time playing some games of chess anyway.

The rest of the day I biked through the city until dinertime. We ate something at home and in the night I went alone on my bike through Cambridge again. I went back to Harvard and bought a nice Harvard-hoodie, something I already wanted for a long time. I also met some new people who were relaxing in the park in Harvard, where I also was in the afternoon. Two of them happened to be a couple and also formed a band together. I wanted to put a link to their website here, but they forgot to e-mail it. Anyway, it was a nice time meeting new people.

At the end of the night I went back home, took some nice night-pictures of the skyline of Boston on my way back and relaxed at home for a while. It’s really nice to chill out more after the hectic days in New York. I think it’s important to find a good balance between active days and relaxing days. These days in Boston absolutely tend more to relaxing days and I really like it! 😎