Conference, New York and Boston

A recent SAE brake conference in the USA has provided me with another opportunity to take a short holiday and visit some friends. This week long trip started with a visit to a resort / conference centre near Dallas, called the Gaylord Texan resort. It's a huge complex with an artificial river flowing through it and some other landscaped features, all under a giant glass house. I got through my presentation, listened to some others, and after 3 days I was off to New York.

Coincidentally, that was the day when Yankees pitcher Cory Lidel flew into a Manhattan building. It worried me a little, but in the end it was the normal delays and bad weather that led to a late arrival. My high school friend, Ben Yung, allowed me to stay at his midtown apartment. From there I made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, took a tour of the New York Public Library (apparently the filmed part of the Thomas Crown Affair there since they didn't use museums), and got a bit closer to the statue of liberty with the Statton Island ferry. Importantly, I tasted some delicious Chinese meals in Chinatown - that's the first since I left Melbourne one year ago.

On the weekend Ben and I took the bus (Greyhound, not the dodgy FungWah busses from Chinatown) to Boston, where another high school friend, Liang, lived. I found Boston to be a beautiful city with many interesting places to explore. There are some playful touches (probably from the university population), such as the apparatuses at Kendall station where one can swing certain handles to try to get some bells or other items to resonate. Liang was kind enough to show us the MIT laboratories where he used to work, but also he gave us a brief tour of the crosstown rivals, Harvard. I wonder what it is like to study at a university where tourists are constantly traversing. UNSW never had that problem.



My last day there consisted of a walking tour along the Freedom Trail, which passes many historical monuments and sites, such as the location of the Boston Massacre, the place where the Boston Tea Party was initiated, and so on. We seemed to spend a lot of time in cemetries - many persons that were important to the Revolution were buried in Boston. After the tour I treated myself with a hearty lunch at "Ye Old Union Oyster House", the oldest restaurant in America. You know it's a restaurant with character when they say, "Put this coaster under your clam chowder so it doesn't slide off the table".

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