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Friday morning I awoke feeling slightly grumpy about having been woken up at 2:30AM the night before to find a man moving my belongings around right beside my bed! Uh…yeah…he explained that he worked at the hostel & needed to move my things so they could squeeze another fold out bed in between my bed & the wall to accommodate an extra guest (making 11 people in our 10 person dorm room…). But sleep interruption aside I was bright & bushytailed (what does that even mean?) & ready to explore Boston! My primary reason for being in Boston was to catch up with a friend of mine, Gabby, who I met while I was over in Canada. She had to work on Friday but we made a plan to meet in the afternoon for coffee, so I set about occupying myself for the morning until then. I got myself a weekly metro card & made my way down town to the Boston Common & the Public Gardens, then I took the train out of Boston to Cambridge to the legendary Harvard University. I spent a little time exploring Harvard Square on my own before meeting up with a walking tour group to be guided through the campus by a current student. Our guide showed us the window of the dorm room where Matt Damon lived in his first year at Harvard (he dropped out before completing his degree to star in Good Will Hunting…for which he won an Oscar, sooooo not exactly your average dropout!). We also saw the famous statue of 3 lies; I will not reveal those 3 lies here in case you ever participate in a Harvard Fraternity initiation & are tested on this, because that would be cheating! Although, you could just watch The Social Network if you really want to know! :P It's a really beautiful campus & it's hard to believe it's been around since the late 1600s!!! Before the USA was even the USA! After the tour ended I had lunch at the Harvard Coop, which is a bookstore with a lovely little café upstairs, then I went to meet Gabby at Starbucks (which is pretty much where anyone goes to meet anyone because they're EVERYWHERE! The only complication being that you need to be really specific about WHICH Starbucks you're supposed to be meeting at…). Oh it was SO lovely to see her! She gave me the biggest hug & we filled each other in on the goings on in our lives over the past 2 years as much as we could in the 45 minutes before she had to go back to work. Gabby's younger sister Gigi (who is the same age as me…only 7 days older in fact!) came to meet me because she's home for the summer studying for the entrance test to go to grad school in the fall (boy am I glad we don't have to take one of those to get into post grad in Australia!). We took the train down town to check out Fenway Park, which is the home of the Boston Red Socks baseball team. The Red Socks were playing the NYC Yankees that night so the streets outside the stadium were already packed with excited fans spilling out of the bars onto the streets. We had a couple of drinks in a bar nearby & chatted to a bunch of Boston locals who'd come to see the game. We did try to get cheap standing tickets to watch the game but they were completely sold out, & the tickets the scalpers were selling on the streets were ridiculously overpriced. Still we managed to soak up the pre-game atmosphere, which many anyone who wasn't a die-hard fan told me was pretty much as good as going to the game itself anyway :P Later in the evening I met up with Gabby, Gigi, & Devon (a friend of theirs) for dinner at a restaurant in Harvard Square
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