Beth Israel Deaconess

 

Enough of serious stuff... I took a walk yesterday to exercise the non-brain parts of my body and stumbled upon the medical area. The building you see above is the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the famous Harvard affiliated teaching hospitals. I found out that Insulin was first given to a New England patient there in 1922! Wow! I honestly didn't know that insulin had been around for so long.. there's still so much resistance to insulin injections now. I also realised that insulin was discovered for use at about the same time and out of the 4 guys who discovered it, one was a medical student :) 3 cheers for inquisitive and motivated medical students! From the picture on the right, you'll see that they've got a pretty little cafe with outdoor sitting as well. It's obvious why noone is sitting outdoors then.... Just in case you think that there's something wrong with my pictures, the floor is blue in colour. That's the salt they pour on the pavements to encourage snow to melt by decreasing the freezing point water (that sec school physics did come in useful after all). I'm sure they chose blue to reflect the persisting cold. Brrr... 

Church

We've found a church to worship at for the moment. It's called Citylife Church, and is affiliated with the Presbytarian Church of America. We've been there twice and we're going back mainly for the sermons. We've been blessed by the good preaching by Dr Um. For the last 2 weeks, he preached about Gal 5:16-26 on the fruit of the Spirit and it spoke to me.

¹⁶So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. ¹⁷For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. ¹⁸But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law. ¹⁹The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. ²²But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. ²⁴Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. ²⁵Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. ²⁶Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

I realised that I've been focusing too much on what I do (which people can see) versus who I am (which only God and I can see). I'm lacking in true love, joy, peace etc and though I seem ok on the outside, I would like to be ok inside as well. The most reassuring part was that God was going to help with this seemingly impossible task. I'm actually quite excited about it. It feels like I was walking around with this chip in the shoulder and I've finally figured out what it is and now I'm scheduled for surgery to remove it. :) For those of you who would like to listen to the sermons, here is the link http://www.citylifeboston.org/sermons.htm.

Egg Tarts

 

I baked egg tarts today! I'm quite proud of it actually, had really low expectations to begin with. WL says that they were pretty good except for the crust, which was too biscuit-like. I usually like the crumbly biscuit tarts rather than the flaky ones, like those from Bengawan Solo. Am trying to figure out how to make them more crumbly... maybe I should e-mail Bengawan and ask them :) It's probably some super unhealthy trade secret that I will regret knowing, like Breadtalk adding MSG to their breads. So on second thoughts, I'll hold that e-mail. Well, it'll be some time before I try this again. We ate them ALL up in one night, thanks to WL, who egged me on.  We were so full we both slept really badly.

Green at last

We were at the Lagoon at the Boston Common, and it was nice to see green finally! The weather is getting warmer so ice has begun to melt at some places. What you see above is the pond itself, which is still frozen over and WL pretending to ice skate. Seriously, there were people who were trying to ice skate on it. We obviously only kept to the edge: I mean, everyone remembers those movie where you fall through the ice into freeing water, right?

It's really nice to be surrounded by parks and nature, somehow it always reminds me that God is here :)

CHinatown

This is Chinatown with the ubiquitous Chinatown gate. The Chinatown here isn't large but it's got everything you would want: good dim sum restaurant (so we were told), good siew yoke place (so we were told) and the chinese supermarket of course! We've been there a few times and we've got our stash of chilli sauce (I finally found the chicken rice chilli sauce.. yippee..), sesame oil, oyster sauce and there's lots of instant noodles, and as you can see from the picture, there's even yeo's packet drinks :) WL found Aik Cheong coffee too! I'm posing with the red plastic cup we found. Haha :) It reminds me of Hong Kong more than home though. I'm still trying to figure out which fish to buy since I can't recognise fishes and I can't identify them by their chinese names. Sad, right?

Walk in the park : more pics

 

Walk in the park

Boston has very beautiful parks. I'm sure they'll be nicer when it's warmer. My fingers were almost frozen by the time I'd finished these photos. As with back home, people feed the ducks despite signs warning us not to and the ducks were so used to it, they happily waded in my direction the moment I came near. Since I didn't have much of an affinity for animals, you could see me escaping from the flock of overly friendly birds.

Bus ride

I went to Harvard Square yesterday and met up with a friend for lunch. We had really good ramen at a restaurant that had a 2 for 1 deal for Harvard students. Yay! Only thing was that the bowl was huge!! (I keep forgetting that I can't finish one portion of food in any restaurant- even asian ones) The other thing I learnt is that you can add baby spinach to noodle soups and it tastes great still. After lunch, we had bubble tea. It was the nicest bubble tea I've had and the most expensive too. Don't really want to talk about the price, I should bear in mind that they had to fly pearls in from Taiwan and that labour costs here are much higher... but it still doesn't seem to justify the cost for me.

Well, talking about costs, look at the parking rates here at Prudential tower. Prudential Tower can be compared to Raffles City, I guess but parking at US$9 per hour!! I think I'm going to stop complaining about parking costs back home...
The view the Charles River was taken from my bus seat on the way home. Yep, I've figured out how to take a bus and where to get off. It's actually much faster taking a bus to Harvard Square compared with the subway. That's because the subway is arranged radially, with all routes emerging from downtown, so to get to Harvard Square, the subway travels like the sides of a right angled triangle while the bus takes the hypotenuse. (I learnt these trigo stuff while studying for my GRE.. I'm not smarter that a 5th grader)

Cheesecake Factory

 

We had super yummy cheesecake at Cheesecake Factory today! They have the best cheesecakes, with more than 20 flavours to choose from and I'm sure that each slice contains too much cheese, cream and calories. After gobbling down bread, pasta and the cheesecake, Wee-Lee and I were stuffed. Our piece of advice: If you visit the US, you must eat at Cheesecake Factory but do SHARE your food, the portions are huge! We had to walk for hours before the food could digest and by dinner, the cheesecake was still sitting in our tummys. I think cheesecakes and pastas don't make mix well.

Harvard Medical School

 

We walked past Harvard Medical School today and I just had to take a picture. It's such an amazing campus, right? It really lives up to its fame, just the buildings alone are enough to inspire medical students. Looking homewards, I have a good excuse for being less inspired :)

Lots of snow!

I braved the snow yesterday to get some groceries. Since I was out, I thought I'd take a few pictures and get a video of the snowfall as well. There was a snow storm with about 5-6 inches of snow. As you can tell from the pictures, there was snow everywhere, even on the walkway. That made walking quite treacherous because it's easy to slip. It's not too bad having snow fall on your head as long as you've got a hat or a hood (kiasu me had both) because snow's quite light and it melts off almost instantly. I took the picture of the church for auntie Helen: just to let you know that there's a church pretty near by :)

Church and more

 

We visited Park Street Church on Sunday and joined the International Student's Fellowship. Someone had recommended it. Though the main service was conducted in a traditional way (think robes and hymns), we were really impressed by the warmth of the Pastor and the leaders at the fellowship. Plus, we had a time of Bible Study and worship singing familiar songs so we were quite happy. After the fellowship ended, we went for a drink at Borders with some new Singaporean friends (it's amazing how many Singaporeans there are in Boston). When we finally took pictures of the church, it was about 5pm and the sun was beginning to set, which explains the lighting. We took a short walk from the church to look for the frog pond at Boston Common because I wanted to check out the ice skating ring there. When we got there, the Zamboni had just completed its round and the ice was pristine but the crowd was huge! I don't think I'll be skating there: too many people. The day's trip ended the usual way with us taking a ride back on the reliable T. 

Where is my bus?

We were at a friend's place on Saturday and we took the Harvard bus to another friend's place for dinner. As we were waiting for the bus, I was introduced to this really cool gadget! It was a real time GPS bus-tracking system. A must-have for impatient Singaporeans: the balloons (blue or pink) tell you where your bus is exactly and it's amazing how much shorter the wait is once you know exactly where your bus is currently. It'll probably be too complicated to implement for the whole of Singapore. What a pity...

Breakfast at Sebastians!

 

This is what we had for brunch on Saturday. It's the nicest looking thing I've cooked so far which doesn't say much about my culinary skills. I was quite happy with the scrambled eggs and baked tomato, which tasted quite good. It was our attempt to replicate the yummy breakfast we used to have at Sebastians, this little restaurant at Greenwood, which has since disappeared. I've got to say something about the waffle: I was intending to make pancakes from scratch but my grandiose plans disappeared when I realised that 32 Aunt Jemima waffles were only selling for $3...