Looking over the side of the USS Constitution, into the frozen river above. There'd be no need to go to a servo or a bottle-o to buy ice here; it's just everywhere in places, especially outside the city.

Andrew (Pete's housemate), Simone and Libe at McFadden's bar.

Friday 9 February – Boston / Salem NH

Have been working up at Salem, New Hampshire (NH) all week. Only about a 35 minute drive, however two contrasting places. There’s no snow on the ground in the city. However, if you drive north for 10 minutes, there starts to be a bit. When you get to Salem, the ground is completely white.

The behaviour of drivers over here is a little bit different. The following points spring to mind:

• There is a lot more tailgating compared to Australian drivers. If you’re in the ‘fast’ lane – which is the left one over here – and there’s a car in front of you holding you up, rest assured there’ll be someone who’ll come and sit right up your backside until you both can get through. And there’s every chance it will be at 110 to 120 km/h.
• There’s a lot more accidents over here that I’ve seen, particularly someone having run up the backside of another. Refer to the comment above and you can put 2 and 2 together – and surely get 4!
• Despite being more aggressive to others in a car, the drivers here are far more friendly to pedestrians than in Oz. Throughout the city on the less busy streets, drivers quite often will stop to allow you to cross in front of them.
• There’s a lot of merging without indicating, particularly on the freeways. And with the greater variance in speed between the slow and fast cars (travelling in the right hand lane generally results in speeds of 110 to 120 km/h), I think I can see (again) why I've seen so many accidents.
• Touch parking (hitting either of the other cars in front or behind you while trying to fit into a parallel spot) seems to be almost accepted here. We watched tonight from the pub as a bloke gave a BMW parked behind him two decent ‘lovetaps’, so much so that the Beamer moved, but proceeded to get out of his car, not even check out the damage and/or bat an eyelid, grab his takeaway chow and drive off. No number left or anything, but it seems to be a common thing as I’ve seen it a number of times – and I’ve seen cars that have been parked while still touching!

Thursday 8 Boston - Salem, NH and Boston, MA

FYI - I've recently updated the blog quite a bit. In particular, there's been commentary updated back to the the Saturday 27th January, and there's a few pictures that have been included (these are on Sunday January 14 at Harvard Uni, and from Saturday 27th January onwards). I'll try to do things in a more orderly fashion down the track.

Also, if pictures don't load on a page, just right click and select 'Show Picture'. Also, you can click on any picture and can see the full-size version of it.

Wednesday 7 February - Boston

Tonight was our second trip to an NBA game. The Celtics had now lost 15 straight and were copping it from all sides. Most of the media are more harsh than ours in that there’s no real support being provided for them – instead of perhaps providing a level-headed critique, everytime they’re brought up on radio and print its about how much they ‘suck’. They have a dedicated TV team who follow them wherever they go and broadcast them on Fox Sports New England, who I reckon provide a really balanced look at every game the Celtics are in, despite the fact that they clearly support the team during the coverage.

Tonight was the against the Miami Heat, last year’s champions (I am not going to call them the ‘world champions’ – they clearly don’t deserve it). Their team includes a few famous names – Shaquille O’Neal, Gary Payton and Alonzo Mourning in particular. The one player I’d never heard over before, but is their gun player, is a bloke name Dwyane Wade (yes, I’ve got that spelling right, it’s ‘Dwyane’). Only in his fourth year, Wade clearly is going to be one of the guns in the league for a long time yet.. Despite being up by 10 at quarter time, the Celtics gave away their lead within the first 2 minutes of the 2nd quarter (which is so typical) and lost by 12, Wade shooting 30.

A couple of odd things about the night:

• Buying tickets off a scalper while walking to the Garden. We think we had a win – although the tickets said $10 on them, we couldn’t find tickets on Ticketmaster during the day for less than $40, so parting with $20 for similarly located tickets wasn’t too bad I think. Dad would be proud. Daryl Kerrigan might be even more proud.
• Pete’s housemate Andrew self-admittedly isn’t a basketball fan. And the game was over quite early. But still not sure that excuses him for falling asleep at the game. Quite early in the game too. And he’s a baseball fan! Baseball is a ‘toilet’ sport – they happen to play only 162 games per home and away season, plus finals – and everyone I’ve spoken to has said they need to drink at the game. If they think cricket is boring, at least we’re happy to sit there without a frothy and watch a full days cricket.

Since first catching up with Pete in Boston, I've learnt one personality trait of his that he has developed since passing through US Immigration in September - his ability to raise everything he doesn't like about the US publicly. I doubt there's been a day go by when Pete hasn't brought up something he doesn't like about the Yanks, otherwise nicknamed by Aussies as the 'Septic Tanks' or 'Septics'.

Hence it was no surprise to see this bottle of 'Listerine AntiSeptic - Pete' on the shelves on CVS Pharmacy today.

Thursday 1 February - Salem, NH & Boston

Kobe Bryant put up 43 points to single handedly beat the Celtics by 11 last night. This bloke is a gun. Celtics have lost 13 in a row but doubt that's a true reflection of how their going. Again, deep into the fourth quarter they were even with their opposition, but the game just keeps getting away from them. It's like when a dog tries to chase its own tail but just keeps going round and round in circles without actually getting what they want. And like the dog, everyone who watches the Celtics team is making fun of it.

While on the subject of NBA Basketball - and other US sports in general - it's time to get one thing straight. The premiership or championship team does not become the "World Champion". Apparently the Boston Celtics have won 16 "World Championships", and the Major League Baseball's grand final series is the "World Series". You have to play in an international competition to be a "World Champion", clearly. The US Dreamteam is a world champion, yes, having won Olympic Games gold. The Celtics... no. Residents of the US... pull your heads in.

The National Anthem - and I'm not knocking it as a song - is flogged to death a bit over here too. It's played at every game in the NBA, and I'm pretty sure the NHL too. That means a player could hear it for 82 regular season games, plus 28 playoffs and finals games (there's 4 finals rounds of 7 games each). I probably prefer our way where it's only played at big games or special events e.g. finals, Anzac Day round, Test matches - that way it carries a real emphasis to it. But it probably suits how patriotic everyone here is... I doubt there's a US citizen who doesn't think that their country is the greatest in the world.

Libe's finally recovering after being crook with the flu all week. I think I might have had a case of it last week but decided to drink my way through and out of it on the weekend, which appears to have been quite successful.

Been quite an amusing little bomb scare over here yesterday: refer to the following links:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21152633-663,00.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/boston.bombscare/index.html