2006 ° Boston   The time is 1.05am here, yet 1.05pm there. It’s been a whole day up in the air trying to get sleep, while watching forgettable movies or listening to lounge music. I’m not sure how much time I’ve lost travelling like that, but there's not so much of a jet lag as I initially anticipated. I’m on the opposite side of the globe, in a city that begins with the letter B, where security check in this paranoid nation means "take off your shoes, please, we've got to scan them." We checked into our rooms just some hours ago; I just ironed my shirts and trousers after a shower and brush. I’ve brought the wrong adapter for this part of the world, the batteries are running out, my phone roaming isn't getting signals and WIFI here is not free. Tomorrow I will see the city that begins with the letter B in bright daylight. And then work begins.

Two mornings of continental breakfast at the hotel restaurant is about all the daytime experience I’ve had of the city since touching down. The rest of the time was spent in the studio - a generous old building along a street off Mass Ave, with enough room to house half the staff we had. But they kept their numbers small - like what, seven or less? So space was abundant - models, large pin-ups, shelves of books and a skylight over the office, keeping the inside warmed and lit - and therefore, very cost-smart on the bills too. And because they like to do lunch-in, it is hard to see how the city works - other than what they claim it to be.

So school's starting for the kids over there and as the youthful studio don't look very far off the age of graduation (though some are married way-too-early), they reckoned we should take off for Harvard GSD that very evening - since Koolhaas is giving a lecture - on, hmm, Preservation of History. And true to the gift of his speech I was "remified" - broken down into chronic hibernate mode - or was it the jet lag finally deciding to purge. we took a walk around the GSD studio - the one with tiers and tiers of drawing tables - and a lot of steps to climb to get up. After all that standing around looking at the pin-ups and models and rubbing shoulders with all the other potential star designers of tomorrow - networking, isn't that what people go to Harvard for? - we left the mingling... from outside the building you can see the inside spaces all lit up in its sloping profile of tiers upon tiers, since it was already dark. We headed back for more red-lining on the trace, like dinner was an endless serving of drawing errata ad nauseam ad infinitum, and when we were finally good for dinner, it was a bloody 11.30pm, and we had to go somewhere 24 hrs - so we had to do diner, "the place where truck drivers go take their meals". The music was blasting "obnoxiously", the lights were all pink and purple, the waitress greeted us with "hi boys, what would you like to have?" and the servings, double extra large. And as if the night wasn't cold enough, I had to order blue cheese in my sandwich. Hmm. Merci beaucoup.

Meanwhile - I hope the work turns out good.

Ok, what about food - so far, the routine (for me) has been: Continental breakfast, BLT sandwich lunch and chicken burger with salad at the diner for Thursday; Continental breakfast again, veggie pad-thai lunch and Korean barbecue dinner for Friday; Dunkin' Donuts takeaway to-go breakfast, black bean burritos for lunch (one chunk of it) and pollo ciao bella with chocolate torte for dinner at Newbury Street on Saturday; Boston chowda for breakfast and carbonara at the Armani cafe (Newbury Street again) for lunch on Sunday, with no time for dinner; and Monday: in-room breakfast of eggs and bacon and hot chocolate, an XL-sized coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, curried tuna sandwich for lunch, and dinner at Bin 26 Enoteca on Charles street. And still eating.

Newbury is quaint in that it is a residential street by default, yet also the street to be in for shopping, coffee, restaurants or club. It doesn't have a fantastic promenade, yet it never seemed crowded. the sidewalks are used as patios for al fresco; groups of people join the queue with their IDs in hand before making their way down to the basement club; most of the townhouses have staircases leading up to the first split level; there are colourful flowers on their lawns, and tall Christmas-like trees. The cars will stop for you while you jaywalk. We walk back to hotel mostly about midnights; the weather is cool - and I can read Fahrenheit’s now.

Time for another jet lag.

The last day ended with MIT and Harvard Yard - Corbu's Carpenter Center, Frank Gehry's Stata Center, Saarinen's MIT Chapel and Kresge Auditorium, (we missed the Aalto's Baker Dormitory totally, since we were on the wrong side of the building), a couple of lluis Sert's and also the museums on Quincy street, where GSD stands. Then a quick quacky tour around the rest of Boston, and time is running out; so two days, many time zones and several movies later, we were air flown over the arctic back to Monsoon Asia, only to have me attend a meeting in the next few hours in bloodshot eyes. I need a lot of sleep; which I did, but when my bio clock went ringing, I would wake up only to see darkness, again, and a hell of things to get started on, in the most silent of Singapore time.

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