A musical tour of Cambridge

Saturday, September 28th.
Interior.
Inside the log cabin "Rec Hall" at the Minuteman Campground a young man has found shelter from the chilly weather. As he types up the latest installment of an online travelogue his head bounces to the beat of a James Brown tune as he tries to decide whether to daydream of a warm summer day or a cup of hot chocolate...

We spent yesterday, Friday, on a tour of the surrounding area looking for thrift shops. It started out as a bit of a wild goose chase, since the first Goodwill store we went looking for ended up being located on a military air force base which sort of excluded us from shopping there. We had better luck with a Salvation Army store that we tracked down. We spent several hours there and brought home another big bag of old shirts as well as a few more cd's, a book of African proverbs and several other random items.

Today, Saturday, we got up at a record-breaking 5:30am! And we did it on purpose! :) We'd decided to head for Cambridge for the day and having learned from our parking experience in Boston we decided to arrive early and see if we couldn't find a parking space on the street. So we avoided all the rush hour traffic and arrived at Harvard Square in the middle of Cambridge at 7 o'clock in the morning. There were plenty of free parking spaces on the street but they were all restricted to 2 hours. We hadn't considered that possibility at all. So we cruised south on Massachusetts Avenue looking for other parking possibilities and at the same time spotting all the shops that we'd want to hit later on.

We made it all the way past the MIT campus and down to Harvard Bridge which leads across the river to Boston without finding a good place to park. But then we discovered that people were parked all the way up and down the street that ran parallel to the river. There were no regulatory signs and we couldn't see that any of them had specific parking permits. So it looked a lot like free parking. Which was just what we were hoping to find, so we left the van there and headed back downtown. It was still only 7:30, though, so no shops were open yet. But McDonalds was open for breakfast, so we decided to eat there. We ordered the standard cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice and a big fried slice off the top of the food pyramid and sat down to observe the strange cast of characters that had also come to McDonalds for breakfast. There were the usual odd characters that, although they dined alone, had more of a conversation going than most of the people that had companions. And there was an African who sat down at a table with an Egg McMuffin, bowed his head and raised his palms toward heaven and prayed to thank the Almighty for the simple meal in front of him.

We took our time eating breakfast and then headed to the Salvation Army thrift shop down the street. The first real catch of the day were the set of 5 left-handed golf clubs that Jens got for $3. Dan fell into conversation with Ed, an old man who had just come home from a 5-week trip to Denmark, of all places! He'd gone there with some Danish friends of his from San Francisco, so he also had some good tips on Frisco, which he definitely thought we should go see. San Francisco was the real California, he said, and called the southern part of the state the "plastic part of California".

Further down the street a small flea market was set up outside another Salvation Army building. Dan bought a really good set of Sony headphones for five bucks, but other than that there wasn't much of interest. From the neighboring Goowill store we brought home a few more shirts and an old briefcase and a pillow with a cute little "Noah's Ark" design on it. The latter were to be used in the construction of a new and more protected home for the iBook. Down the street and around the corner was a small church-operated thrift shop. Jens found a few more shirts there and Dan managed to get a huge Army duffel bag for a dollar, another major catch of the day. And what would he want to fill a duffel bag with? You guessed it; old second-hand shirts. :)

We toured the neighborhood yard sales down the street and then headed back to the van to unload all the stuff we'd bought.

We then had lunch at the Jerusalem Café down the street from the MIT campus. We had a great falafel sandwhich and a hot bowl of soup while enjoying the view from our window seats. Right outside our window was an old vagabond with a huge head of dreadlocks tied together in odd constellations and a beard that was also turning into a giant dreadlock. He was enjoying a complimentary meal that the woman in the café had given him. There was a guy out on the sidewalk playing his guitar, so we had live music to go with our meal as well.

After lunch we started the grand tour of all the used cd stores we could find on Massachusetts Ave. We bought several regular priced cd's but spent most of our time hunting through the $1 bargain bins. We found some really great cd's in those bins and also bought quite a few that we didn't know but though sounded good, judging simply from the name or the cover. For that price we could afford to experiment. Between the two of us we brought home some 25 cd's, spanning every category from African pop over acoustic rock to heavy metal.

Not content to bring home recorded music we thought we'd take advantage of the fact that we were in the heart of a college town on a Saturday night and see some live music as well. So after a bite to eat at Burger King we headed over to the Middle East Café which is a highly regarded local rock venue. Not being very knowledgable on local music it was pretty much a shot in the dark deciding where to go. But we decided on a 3-band show in the basement under the Middle East. Although we'd never heard of any of the bands they clearly had lots of local fans, judging by the responsive audience. The first band was a fairly melodic heavy rock band that we thought was pretty good. The second band, which we liked the best, was more eclectic and had a great percussionist and a lead singer that looked to be as strange and eccentric as a lead singer in a rock band should be. The last band was a 4 piece rock band from New York that clearly had a large local fan base. They had the unusual set-up of two bassists and one guitarist which made for a pretty heavy sound that we didn't care much for but which seemed to resonate pretty well with the local underground crowd.

We headed back to the van sometime after 1 o'clock, tired and hard of hearing but glad that we'd caught that show. We also realized that we'd spent more money than really planned that day, so to regain some of our losses we decided to sleep in a parking lot that night instead of checking back into the KOA and paying $25 for half a night's sleep. So we drove out of town and back toward Littleton and pulled into sleep in a shopping center somewhere along the way.