Day 7: Duck Tour, Harvard, Art

For some reason I woke up at 4:30 and then my family was all up at 5:30...?

Whaaaaat?

And we are an hour ahead here so I don't know why we all woke up so early...

Today was the first day we used the "T"

I love how in each city it's called something different:

In New York it's the Subway,

Washington DC is the Metro,

In Salt Lake City it's the Front Runner

here it's the "T" like Transit I think?

Anyways that's always fun and a little confusing at first.

Lot's of sketchy people

Lot's of crowded spaces

At 9 we went on a Duck Boat Tour.

They are basically just like bus tours but they can go in the water, so cities that are near water (obviously) have them. I know Seattle has tours and probably Chicago.

I frickin love my outfit.
Someone buy me this exact Marmot jacket.

Our tour guide was funny, but also kindddaaa crazy....

He had glitter all over his face because it was a "ceremonial powder for one of the God's of money"?\
And had one long earring of a moon. 

Yeahhhh kinda of different...

He let me drive the boat on the water though so he was pretty cool.

ignore my weird face

The most memorable part of the ride was
1. The traffic. Our tour went like 45 minutes longer than it was supposed to.
2. I REALLLLY had to pee.

**If you do not wish to hear my peeing story just skip this next paragraph.

I convinced my mom to buy Naked juice, and we bought two different kinds in the BIG bottles, so I drank a glass of each for breakfast.... that was my mistake. Like 30 min in I realized I had to pee. It progressively got worse and worse. About an hour and 20 minutes in I realized that I was going to burst if I didn't get off that bus! I couldn't cross my legs and I was going delusional. I seriously considered jumping out the window multiple times. Finally my mom decided to take the bullet for me and asked if we could pull over and use the restroom. There are almost no public bathrooms in Boston, and pulling over is super hard with traffic, but our driver did and told us to use this one restaurant's bathroom. We ran through traffic and got to the door AND IT WAS LOCKED. I just about started crying then. Or screaming. I almost went down the alley to pee hahahaha. But we just kept opening random doors and finally one opened! It was a super fancy restaurant that wasn't open yet but they forgot to lock the door so we snuck in and used their bathroom. HALLELUJAH.

And that was the most memorable part of the ride.
Make sure you go to the bathroom before.
And don't drink lots of liquids.

For lunch we went to China Town and ate at one of the restaurants. It was legit because they all spoke Chinese, had tea, chopsticks, everything was in Chinese, and my mom was the only white person in the whole place.

That was pretty good. I ate pretty much alllll the Crab Ragoon. And I don't even feel bad about it.



After we went to Harvard.
(or as they joke Haavaad)

Our tour guide was a recently graduated student.
(he was cute)
I loved being in a campus where you could tell that a lot of people around you were intelligent-not geniuses (I don't think you have to be a genius to attend Harvard), but just hard working smart people

Our guide would constantly remind me of all the ways Harvard was better than Yale: football, Harvard students are funnier, Harvard is better at everything (except law), etc

I'm not going to lie, I really want to attend Harvard or Yale.
I will definitely be getting my undergrad at BYU, but I'd love to experience an Ivy League school and living in a big city.

He told us about "The Game" between Harvard and Yale, and how Harvard has won for the past 9 years. Apparently one year though, Yale students dressed up and pretended to be a Harvard "pep squad" and ran through the student section to get people pumped up. They gave Harvard students signs to hold up that were supposed to spell out "Go Harvard" or something. Instead it spelled out "We Suck". For such an intelligent group of people you'd think they'd notice but instead they held up the signs 3 times before noticing.

How did they not notice.

They have different amounts of letters.....

Apparently there was also a prank where Harvard's comedy newspaper store the beloved weather vane (i can't remember, the thing on top of the building) and kept it for a long time. Then when a Soviet Union leader came to visit they GAVE IT TO HIM as a "present"! HAHAHA that is sooo funnny! So they didn't get it back haha


One more story:
Apparently one of the newspapers also has a special chair that the editor sits in or something.
Well one student (it's someone famous who has a comedy show) decided to steal it.
Someone got wind of it, so they called the Harvard police to guard it.
He found out so he called the Cambridge police and said that there were some students who were planning on stealing the chair by dressing as Harvard police.
When they both got there they tried to arrest each other and the guy just took the chair

He then kept it for 2 YEARS and gave it back in a huge public manner at his graduation!

That's so epic.
Props to him.


Another Harvard tradition is getting their stress out by yelling and streaking the night before finals. About 1,000 streak, 3,000 watch.
I can't decide which I would be.
Depends on how dark it is....
I think if it was pretty dark I would TOTALLY do it though!!

Our guide also told us the story of their library:
(it was wayyyy better when he told it)

So there was a wealthy student who had just graduated and he loved collecting books. Right after he graduated he and his dad went to Europe to find cool books. They found two different original series or something cool and wanted to bring them back right away so they booked a passage on the next boat. That boat happened to be the Titanic. Since they had first class seats they were automatically the first to be put on the life boats but he and his father gave up their seats and died.
His grieving mother wanted to do something in her only child's honor, so she offered Harvard 1 million dollars (100 million now) to build a new library after him. They took her up immediately and knocked down the old library. His mom was scared that someone else would give Harvard money and that they would knock down her son's library so she created 3 things that the school must follow in order to keep the money:

1. The outside cannot be adjusted
they now have tons of floors underneath that stretch out farther than the building

2. There will be a room inside that only two people can go to. One being the janitor and the other her son. The janitor must bring flowers every morning-and he still does! All the students think that this room has probably made the library haunted since she is basically wanting his ghost to come back.

3. Every student has to pass a swimming test before they graduate. His mom thought that maybe her son would have lived if he could have swam. She must not have thought about the freezing cold water and how he was in the middle of the ocean... Harvard had to get rid of this rule though because of the American Disabilities Act of 1990 (the tour guide said 1970 though and I know I am right so that makes me feel good that I knew something a Harvard grad doesn't haha...)

No pictures of Harvard because of lost camera. Bummer right??


After  we went to the Art Museum. I looked around for forever, and then realized it had only been 30 minutes....I have a short attention span I guess.


I was super excited though because they had Hokusai's "Great Wave"!
I've always wanted to see it because in 9th grade my English teacher had us write about whatever we thought of when we saw this image.
I remember my friend went up and shocked us all. He wrote about so many symbols he had seen it was incredible. I wonder if he still has what he wrote....it was stellar.

Here's my lovely picture with a screen reflection. Yay.

I thought this looked pretty rad.

I wonder how many of Monet's 250 Water Lily paintings I can see in my lifetime.



I just really liked these pieces:

 this is inspired by building plans!

I decided that when I'm older and have a house the BEST present I could ever get is a creative large piece of art. I think that would be soooo cool.

So yeah someone tell my future husband that.

getting tired.

I think a week is a good amount of time for a vacation.