Wannabe World Traveller

In the past three months, I’ve been on two short trips (long weekends), one to DC and one to Boston. The main purpose of both of these trips was to visit colleges, but I had other fun, too.

Boston was a far more independent experience for me. I stayed with my cousin, who’s a student at Emerson, and spent the days largely on my own. I visited three colleges (I applied to one), successfully navigated the T (not a problem after successfully navigating the New York subway system!), and had a rather collegiate experience of Boston. I stayed with college students, partied one night with college students, went to CollegeFest, an event for college students. This probably influenced my perception of Boston quite a bit; I know it’s a city with a lot of history, but what I saw was a very college-oriented city. I don’t think that’s totally inaccurate, though, after talking to other people. There are just so many college students in Boston! I doubt that Boston’ll be the city for me, though, because I want to go to a “real” city; that is, one that doesn’t seem to cater to a specific segment of the population. I had fun for a weekend, but I think I’d get bored spending three or four years there.

In Washington, DC, I was with my dad, and, again, I visted three colleges and am applying to one. I made all of the arrangements, made plans, navigated, all of that was up to me, though, so it was good experience for later. DC is also oriented to something specific, like Boston, but in this case it’s politics (big surprise there), which, I think, is an orientation I prefer (though still not what I consider a “real” city). Navigating public transit was pretty simple. I ate tasty Salvadoran food, and I love Salvadoran food, so that was great. I also went to my favorite Smithsonian (Natural History–I like the rocks). I saw a book that I contributed to, in paperback (the first time I’d seen that) in a Barnes and Noble; that was amazing. It wasn’t my first time in DC, so I already knew I liked the city, but I also know that no American city will ever compare to how much I’d love to live in New York.

On both trips, I flew through Detroit. Flying over Detroit, I know I never want to spend time in the city itself–it’s organized around the major roads and goes on for miles and miles of flat roads. I hate driving, I don’t really like the Midwest, and Detroit just looked so uninspiring from the air. It looked soul-sucking. But I did like the airport. It’s got a little train-subway type thingy going from one end of the terminal to the other, and an interesting art installation with flashing colored lights and weird sounds in a tunnel between two different terminals.

In case anyone’s interested, the colleges visited where Boston University, Tufts, Suffolk, George Washington, Georgetown, and American, and the ones I’m applying to are Suffolk and George Washington.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 12:35 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.