Boston trip

This past weekend Friday we all went to Boston for the AmeriCorps opening day event that all the AmeriCorps programs in Massachusetts went to, which meant that Danielle was there too! It was great to see her, and since we both had Monday off for Veteran's Day we stayed in the city and hung out for the weekend and then headed back on Monday. We spent a lot of our time just hanging out at Danielle's friend Hina's apartment, but we did do some fun stuff so I'll give you some of the highlights.

Like I said, Friday was the opening day for AmeriCorps. That was basically just a rally where some people gave speeches and someone from each program gave a short description of what they do. I had no idea there were so many people in AmeriCorps programs, there were tons of people and that was just all the people who serve in Massachusetts. I was especially surprised at how many City Year members there were, about a quarter of the people there seemed to be with City Year. Here's the best picture I could get of the crowd, there were even more people that I couldn't fit in the frame. (You can see Danielle and some of the people from my program in the foreground in the maroon polos.)

After the speeches, we got lunch provided and then moved on to the afternoon activities. The activity we were signed up for was a tour of the state house, which was really cool. I loved learning about the history of it and seeing the chambers where the state senators and representatives actually meet. I seem to have grown more interested in history recently so it was really cool to learn about, and the architecture in old buildings like that is always really fascinating so I enjoyed it a lot.

Inside the state house

The senate chamber

The house chamber

The hall of flags. Each town has a flag hung on the wall, I tried to find Wellfleet's flag but the closest I came was finding the Falmouth one.

Then a bunch of us played paintball on Saturday, which was really cool. I had never played before and it was a great experience. I don't have any pictures of us during paintball because I left my phone in the car so it wouldn't get paint on it, but I do have some pretty impressive bruises to show for it. I knew it was probably going to hurt to get hit by paintballs but some of them hurt more than I expected. Getting covered in paint was kind of fun though haha.

Other than that, the highlight of the weekend I think was the IMAX show Danielle and I went to see on Sunday at the Museum of Science. It was about the arctic, and had a lot of cute polar bears. :) I always enjoy seeing IMAX shows, and they always have great ones at the museum so I try to go whenever I'm in Boston if I can.

So that's the basic overview of my weekend. I'm not sure I'll have anything very interesting to write about between now and Thanksgiving, but it's possible that we could get called to help with a dolphin stranding tomorrow morning. My roommate who works IFAW, the group that responds to strandings, was working with them all day today monitoring dolphins who they thought might get caught on shore when the tide went out and that possibility stills stands for tomorrow so I might have something exciting to write about tomorrow, but maybe not. Hopefully for the dolphins we won't have to go, but it is bound to happen at some point so I'm sure it's an experience I'll be writing about eventually.