Plus, the weather had improved an amazing deal, so I couldn't help being in a good mood. It didn't rain at all, and we could see a tiny space of blue sky in the thick blanket of clouds above. It's funny, because yesterday, because it had been so cold and rainy on our first walk, we'd prayed to God in our own impersonal way for warm weather, and now we'd gotten it. Pretty neat.
When we were nearly through with the walk, we ate breakfast: an apple and a banana each. Then we walked towards home, but on the way Annette felt like using a pay phone to call our friend Tamara (remember, the woman whose family we flew with to Boston?) so we could make plans to meet with them in the future, maybe to hang out at the famous Public Gardens or something. I went to get the Metro, but there were no more papers left in the bin, so I went back to Annette. Though on the way I did do a good deed and throw away some littered trash on the ground. That made me feel good. ^,^
Annette said she didn't talk to Tamara, but she'd caught Joe and he'd said that they'd already been to the Public Gardens, but they could meet us at the Frog Pond the next day. So that was nice. When we got back in the apartment, it felt good to relax for a while. I got us some cereal to eat out of cups for a snack. While in the kitchen I met Leroy, Jake's Weimaraner dog. He was very sweet. He licked my face when I bent down to pet him, and he didn't even know me very well. I'll admit that I am a fan of big, lickity dogs. ^,^
So we had this college tour thing at UMass, or the University of Massachusetts, scheduled for 3:00, so we had most of the day to plan for other days ahead (I'm not telling! You'll read about them later anyway!) and blog as much as we could. Finally we figured it was time for us to go. We took an incredibly looooong train ride, so we did some crosswords on the way. At one point we had to switch from the Green Line to the Red Line, but eventually we got to our stop. We then had to wait for the shuttle bus that would take us to campus. We waited at that bus stop for a long time, so long that we were a few minutes late for the tour. Finally the bus showed up and quickly took us there, but we were about 10-15 minutes late or something. We asked directions for where we had to go from this campus police guy (he wore an official looking uniform) and he pointed us out to the admissions office or somewhere.
We found the office, which looked quite nice, and the lady at the desk said we'd only missed the info session and we could wait for the people to come out for the tour to start. Phew! So we hadn't missed anything important! (In my experience, info sessions are slightly boring affairs. You just sit at a table while someone talks about the school. At least you're up and seeing it when you're on the tour.) We signed out some form and took a small Reese's chocolate from the desk.
The UMass tour was quite interesting. It's hard to describe everything the tour covered, but the part that most stood out for me was their excellent cafeteria. They don't exactly have a meal plan, they just charge for the food there. The tour guide was nice. After it was over, Annette and I lagged behind, sat at a nearby picnic table and ate cucumber and tomato sandwiches. Very nice. (Oh, wait! I totally forgot about mentioning us going to the Star Market earlier in the day to buy the sandwich stuff! Oh well. I guess it's not that important.) When we were all done, we cleared the table and went to wait at the shuttle bus stop. For some strange reason, the bus took a really long time to get there, so we decided that we wanted to go see the nearby JFK museum. (As you would guess, that's a museum dedicated to John F. Kennedy. ^,~)
I'll make this story short: we took a nice, beautiful walk near the bay, though it was very long and tiring and we didn't quite know where we were going, and when we finally got to the museum, It had been closed for several minutes already, so we were too late. GRRR!!! That's so upsetting. But I didn't let it get to me, because you know what they say: "It's about the journey, not the final destination." Something along those lines, anyway. Luckily the bus came in front of the museum a couple minutes later, so that's divine timing for ya. The train back was long. We used the "B," so we stopped right in front of the house. We marveled at how little money we'd spent that day, just 10 dollars on the sandwich supplies.
Basically we lazed about the remainder of the day, and I actually finally finished writing about our first day. Went to sleep to Jake's cool music again, but then around 11:00 or so we got a sudden Skype call from Benny and Adam that half woke us. Well, half because we weren't all that asleep. It was nice talking to them, (hadn't heard from them all day), but they gave us the sad news that Michael Jackson had died that night. (More on that tomorrow perhaps.) We finally ended the long conversation, quite tired, but we fell back asleep easily enough.
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