By the end of week 5 at work, David and I had been working on directing the field test for our biofuel project. We had been directing the efforts of the suppliers, the operators, and the engineers towards developing a protocol for running the field test in the district heating boilers down in Baltimore. We had met quite a few challenges on this front, including surmounting logistics, making sure that the test happened on an expedited timescale so that we could write our presentation to our global scot before he went on holiday and dealing with last minute issues in compliance. It has been a real learning curve so far: everyone is so busy that the company doesn't need interns, they need engineers. Sometimes we find that there are things that would've saved us time if our managers had told us one nugget of information and things that would've been a little more fluent if we had had a briefing. But they say you don't truly know somewhere until you get lost there: if you use sat nav to find your way around, you'll never learn to navigate. We've had to go the extra mile to work things out and because of this, we reckon we've learned so much more about the company. Anyway, week 5 had been all about setting up for Monday in Baltimore - more on the next blog.

So what did we get up to through the week? If you've been keeping up with the other blogs, then you'll have read about the blue man group. I've seen a range of attempted descriptions for this magnificent little show, and mine will be no better: it's completely undescribable. It is basically a comedy/musical/mime delivered by 3 guys painted blue. They use synchronised dancing/music, facial expressions and a lot of mime-esque stuff to be truly funny. I reckon I'll go again when some of my family come to visit.

We also went up the Prudential tower basically to get a vista of Boston. It was pretty stunning, gorgeous day, millions of photograph opportunities. It gives an audio tour of the 360 degree view from the top, but I didn't listen: I was pretty speechless gaping out the window at the city. We went to the cheesecake factory afterwards - another thing that left me speechless for a while.

At the weekend, we headed down to New York City to meet with Graeme, Chris, Matthew and Claire - the New York Saltire interns - so they could show us around. The highlights were seeing Times Square, going up the Rockefeller (to achieve the same thing as in the prudential except even more mind-blowing) and going to a basketball match in Madison Square Gardens where we spotted the unmistakably shaped head of Thierry Henry at the front. No surprise that he's into basketball after his heroics in the world cup qualifiers, eh? Anyway, we had a triumphant weekend looking around NYC. As we headed on the bus back to Boston, I found myself comparing the two: NY is so fast paced, everything is so tall, everything is so busy... Boston by comparison is more serene, relaxing and not quite as huge. I think I'd prefer to live in Boston but holiday in NY. Every one of us made the comment at some point on Sunday, "it's good to be home" as we pulled back into South Station. I'm going to miss it here!