Well here's my first blog since getting started. I'm sure anyone following the blogs will be seeing a lot of us Bostoners, there are... 8? Anyway, I'm smack in the middle of downtown Boston with David Veitch, the negotiations have of course begun to join forces with the other guys out Cambridge way for some shenanigans. It'd probably hurry the situation up if I bought a phone, but... we'll get there!

So what's it been like? Everything is so similar yet so different. You see Tony the Tiger on cereal boxes (yes, I'm on first name terms with this particular fictional feline) except it isn't frosties... It's frosted flakes. The pepsi bottles here are an odd shape, but it still tastes the same! The first night we got here, we went to a bar. Typical Scots eh? But when we were sitting there, we might as well have been in any bar in Glasgow, apart from the accents! And no Tennent's lager...

I feel immediately at home in Boston. I reckon there are a few reasons for this. Like I said above, everything is different, but the same. Alongside that, there are so many things we're familiar with thanks to TV. The fire hydrants, the parking meters, the taxis, dollar bills... it's like we're on a movie set! But not only that, people are so friendly here. You get a "have a nice day" thrown your way just because you let someone go through a door first. You can enter a lift without a 45 second awkward silence descending. The Americans always have something to say, always go out of their way to make you welcome and seem to take delight in our ignorance of their sports. Sports...  well, in true British fashion, me and Dave went hunting for sports shops today, bought a football and started booting it around Boston Common. The locals got quite involved! "Hey, is that the soccer ball from the world cup?" "Yeah, you want a squeeze?" and immediately a brotherhood was formed. By brotherhood I of course mean the exchange of 2-3 sentences. But still! 

The weather - what can I say. It's roasting. Absolutely roasting. As a semi professional ginger who finds the south of England warm enough to merit crawling from A to B, it's taking a lot of adaptation over here! Luckily walking to work at 8am and walking back at 6pm means I avoid the worst of it during workdays when I'm not wearing shorts/tshirt.

Now onto the most important part: the food. I can't describe the food without jamming words together, so here goes. The food is outridiculously fannificent. We're spending $10 a day in different venues every day sampling gourmet sandwiches, kebabs (oh yes, kebabs), pasta... everything! I have to basically eat nothing for dinner and have to sell my soul to the gym, or I'll inflate before going home. It's worth it. I might actually make a bit of a blog spin-off as some kind of restaurant critique? Nah, I won't do that. But I might do some kind of "sandwich of the week" or something. The possibilities are endless!

Ok now onto work! Well Dave and I are working together at Veolia Energy on a project to introduce biofuels into their steam boilers (essentially where they burn diesel to turn water into steam and sell the steam to adjacent buildings as a heat/energy source). It's challenging, in that neither of us have ever seen a steam boiler in action so we have to use a lot of initiative/imagination, it's taxing - 8 weeks is no time at all to do a project on this scale - and it's rewarding: we are pushing this project along by ourselves. There is no one to pick up the slack if we drop the ball, there is no one with their foot ready to swing at our collective backsides: this project is completely and utterly what we make of it. We are getting the power to make decisions on the direction, the scope, the scale and everything including our travel arrangements: within 24 hours notice, we can ask to be sent to Baltimore (hundreds of miles away) on a plane to look around the site or perform a field test should we deem it necessary. It's scary, this amount of responsibility, but at the same time... it's kinda inspiring - we are directly in control of how much we get out of this. How many undergrads get that kinda luck?

Anyway, that should be enough for this week. Hope everyone else is having fun..!