I keep getting asked what I’ve been doing up here. I’ve been busy(ish). Lots of walking and very little sitting around online. Well less than normal for me at least.
My normal work day involves waking up at 6:30, going to work and sitting in class all day. Afterwards I either go out to eat somewhere with some of the people from class or eat leftover takeout food. When I do return to the hotel I play Godfather: Blackhand Edition or watch the Millennium DVDs I bought over the weekend. (Locke’s in it!) Usually by midnight I’m snoozing in bed.
Of course it isn’t exactly like that every night but that’s a pretty decent overview. Tucked away in between all that is a lot of walking around the city. I love being able to walk everywhere, although it seems to take just as long as it would to drive somewhere in RI. The nice part is it gives me just enough exercise to keep me from feeling to bad about eating out all the time. For the record, Starbucks is my new favorite place to eat lunch. Nothing can beat a grande mocha frappachino and pre-made turkey (or tuna!) sandwich combo.
Last Wednesday I finally got a laptop, network login and email access. The laptop is pretty nice. Waaay better than my old laptop and my home computer, which is pretty sad. Because I’m a dork: IBM Lenovo, Core Duo T2500 (2 GHz) with 2 gigs of ram and an ATI Mobility Radeon 1400. The day everyone got them I get a call from Sumeer a few minutes after getting back from class. “Did you read your email yet?” “Nope” “They scheduled dinner for us; it’s in a half hour” So everyone rushed down to the lobby and we all took a couple of cabs and to the Atlantic Fish. As we get out of the cab we see a ton of people dressed up all fancy. Crap. I’m wearing jeans and a semi-wrinkly shirt, but luckily I’m not the only one. Then we realize that the Atlantic Fish is actually the less swanky but still nice place next door. We had a private room for 15 people and while there I met a bunch of the Practice Leaders at Pega and ate really expensive fish. I’m pretty sure the bill was like 700 bucks easy.
Over the weekend I spent most of my time continuing to wander around the city. This time with John and Colin, who are from England. They seemed amazed that everything wasn’t vandalized and how cheap everything is. Which made me wonder if I really want to visit England someday. We also went on a duck tour. A duck tour is a tour of the city on a World War 2 vehicle that’s a cross between a boat and a truck. A conducktor (get it?), drives you around the city and points out various sights and trivia facts, then they drive into the river and you motor around a bit. It was pretty cool I’d walked to most of the places we went too on the tour already but the background information was neat. While on the water the conDUCKtor (now you get it right?) let a couple of kids drive and some random ~30 year old guy. One of the kids nearly managed to turn the boat around before the driver straightened things out.
One thing I’ve noticed about being here is that it doesn’t seem to matter which way you go, you always end up finding what you’re looking for. Sunday night I got on Google and mapped out directions to a movie theatre. Them I set off to find it.
On the way to the theatre I cut through the park and saw some rather odd things. First, there was a guy outside preaching to a group of homeless people. A few feet away some lady was dressed all in white, face makeup and all wearing a colonial-esque dress stood in front of a white broken TV with out moving a muscle. I also saw a drunken guy who was involved in some sort of drunken fight the day before. Which involved another bleeding drunk guy, the police and paramedics. Interesting stuff no doubt.

Ok back to the movie theatre. So after I get out of the park I see a movie theatre ahead. Wait a minute, this isn’t the right road. I ended up finding a completely different theatre which just happened to be playing Transformers at more convenient time.
Transformers was way better than I expected. I was a bit worried they were going to destroy transformers the way they killed Inspector Gadget. There were tons of inconsistencies and plot holes but they didn’t stop me from being entertained through-out the movie. When will Hollywood realize that a monitor isn’t the computer? Or for that matter learn anything about how computers work? Overall I give it a 76/100.
Today I started round two of class which began by contradicting much of the stuff we learned in the first week. I’ve got a new instructor who is a better teacher and manages to get us out on time but my head was spinning with all the stuff that seems to have changed since last week. I was also informed that I need to get a passport, which makes me wonder where I might be headed in the future. Canada is probably the most likely place. I attempted to visit the post office today to drop off the application but when I walked through the automatic door an alarm went off and everyone on the block looked at me. So I got out of there pretty quickly. Why the door would open if the post office is closed and the alarm active I don’t understand.

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