The "Phoren" train ride

En route DC – NYC, I originally penned down this post in a notebook as the moving train made it more and more difficult to write and even more difficult to read later on.

This makes the first time that I took a train outside of my home country and quite frankly, the experience is very different.

Booking at the very last minute, we had still gotten “business class” tickets for the Acela Express train from Union Station, Washington DC to Penn Station, NYC. I was too excited to experience this voyage, well, before I found out that there was only business class and first class on the train. No Coach/Economy class on the train ???

DC’s Union Station, as we entered, gave the air of an airport rather than a train station, with its souvenir shops, Starbucks & Dunkin Donuts (of course), a Victoria’s Secret store among other apparel shops and infinite number of eateries. And just like at an airport, we waited at a lounge, till about 15 minutes before the departure time.

At 6:15 PM, the gates swung open and we walked through a tunnel and set our eyes on the majestic 2124 Amtrak Acela Express Train waiting for us.

With a Starbucks Cappuccino in my hand, I climbed up the 6 coach machine and started looking around for seat numbers.

Just like the movie theatres over here, there is no concept of reserving specific seats for passengers. Everyone has made peace with the First Come First Serve system and are quite civil about it.

We found 2 vacant “business class” seats and stowed away our luggage in the overhead compartments.

As the train embarked upon its journey, making its way through the states of Maryland and New Jersey, I pulled open the front table and started scribbling.

Frankly, I feel like an idiot sitting with a pen and paper because everyone, and I mean literally everyone around me, is Apple branded.

My cousin sitting in the window seat has an iPhone 5S, the pretty girl on my right, (mid - twenties, has a pretty cool job) is working on a Macbook Air and an iPad mini. I’m quite sure she has an iPhone in her bag.

The middle aged couple in the front have apple tablets and even the train conductor is scanning the barcodes printed on our tickets with an app on his iPhone. 

Me on the other hand, have a pen, a notebook, 2 magazines and a sucky BlackBerry Curve which doesn’t even catch the train’s Wi-Fi signals.

The 2h45m ride passes by in a jiffy as we pick up our luggage and get out into Manhattan’s cold and damp air.

Until the next flashback …

Oh my Boston.

Recently, I got a chance to visit Boston, the capital and largest city in the New England state of Massachusetts and the dream of every prospective business school & engineering student.

Boston is quite a different city if you compare it with other business & education hubs. New York often comes up in comparisons and while NYC is one of the cultural, financial and fashion capitals of the world, Boston trumps it easily when it comes to the best cities for students.

I will not compare these 2 cities here and rather narrate my short 20 hour visit to the home of the Red Sox.

The Delta shuttle flight from NYC to Boston took under 1 hour to reach the Logan International Airport (all the flights, domestic and international, arrive and depart from the same airport, this is so simple than having 2 or even 3 airports) from where, we checked into our room at the adjoining Boston Logan Hilton, which is in such close proximity of the airport that we walked through the shared passageway between the two structures and reached the Hotel Lobby in under 2 minutes.

Post some rest and a hot shower, we took the hotel shuttle to the Airport station on the Blue Line.

An average metro car comprises of people from different age groups but what I witnessed in Boston was rather different.

Everywhere I looked, I saw students. Clad in overcoats, books in hand and earphones in ears, I saw groups of boys and girls in their late teens, twenties and some maybe in their early thirties. Also, being in the States, you would expect majority of the people speaking in English, or perhaps, the second language - Spanish but here again, a rather strange surprise.

The train coaches were bustling with tongues from various different continents. A trio sitting in front of me were chatting in french, who, when exited, were replaced by 4 teenagers gossiping in Spanish. To my left were two guys talking in Japanese and near the door, stood a young adult on a call, conversing in German.

This truly explains what a students' hub looks like. One of the top 3 cities in the world for college goers, it houses some of the biggest names in the stream of education. Harvard, MIT, Berklee College of Music, Boston University,  Boston College, Emerson College and many many and yet many more.

In about 20 minutes we reached our rendez-vous point of Hynes Convention Centre, in Boston's Back Bay area where a friend, who goes to in the Berklee College, showed us around. 

We took a short tour of Berklee, including a quick sneak peak into the classrooms and practice rooms, where, even at 11pm on a Saturday night, students were quite determinedly practicing their musical instrument of choice while the others sat back and listened to the masterpieces in the making.

The ones who believe in the American motto of work hard and party harder, were lined up in queues outside taverns and bars enjoying the warmer than usual weekend (warmer as it hadn't snowed in the past week; me and my friends were shivering in 4 layers of clothing as some girls passed us by wearing minis).

The most common sight in Boston was the turf war between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts who've conquered every corner of every street of every block of the city, serving coffee aficionados who relaxed on comfortable armchairs with eyes glued to their fired up MacBooks.

The next sight was of the very enthralling Boston Common, the oldest city park in the US. All covered up in snow, I am quite sure this park, right in the centre of the city, with its frozen lake and snowed in gardens, could've played the part of the ice forest in the Narnia chronicles.

The bridge inside the park gave us a great vantage point to look at the tallest buildings in Boston, the John Hancock Tower and the Prudential Tower, the bustling streets underneath and the adjacent Chinatown, where we headed next.

I have been to the Chinatown in NYC and seen it tons of times on TV but the one in Boston gave me quite the scare.

It was quite odd to see it mostly deserted on a Saturday night as we roamed the streets around the various mani-pedi shops and restaurants of Chinese, Vietnamese and other Asian cuisines, looking for a place which had food on its menu that we'd actually heard of.

On our way back, we took in the beauty of the city, with its young crowd, chilly winds, hoards of snow at the sides of the road and disco buses (a hop-on hop-off bus running up and down the streets with people dancing to loud music, disco lights and a stripper pole in the centre).

Day 2 was all about visiting Harvard and MIT in the adjoining Cambridge area. 

From Hynes, a bus dropped us at Massachusetts Avenue, from where we walked to the Harvard Business School. Mostly deserted on a Sunday morning, we still got to gaze at the architecture of the oldest University in the States, its Memorial Church, the John Harvard statue in the Harvard Yard, its athletics arena, the Harvard stadium and nearby memorabilia shops run by Harvard students, selling Harvard apparel.

While we couldn't get a backstage pass into Harvard, we were extremely lucky when it came to MIT. Another friend, who is studying there, used her access card to smuggle us in and out of the Arts, Earthly Sciences and various other buildings, including the best of them all, and the most relevant to me, the Sloan Business School. 

Also doubling as our guide, this friend informed how this new building, with quite a different taste of architecture from other MIT buildings, just completed construction in 2010. The location of the building is truly justified as you enter the hallway and gaze upon the view overlooking the Charles river and the city's skyline. 

Vowing to be back for more, for a much longer time period to better explore the city when we actually apply for these schools, we packed our bags and headed back, dreaming of that hopeful day in the not-so-distant future.