Last Days in Boston

Monday, May 30, 2022

We returned to Cambridge from The Berkshires at about 6:30pm. I parked the car on Harvard Street, and we unloaded our backpacks. I started to sneeze, as Boston had a very high pollen count.

At 7:10pm, Mounisha (our Turo host) arrived to pick up her Honda Civic. I handed off the keys, and Inna and I walked to the nearby Tatte Bakery for our small dinner. The bakery closed at 8:00pm, so we hurried to place our order. I ordered a Chicken Salad sandwich, while Inna selected a Lamb entree with a few small tea cakes for dessert.

When Tatte Bakery was closing, we returned to our apartment, and each took a shower. We were a bit tired and drank some hot tea. The allergies bothered me a lot, and I was sneezing incessantly.

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

In the morning, we woke a bit later (due to being tired from our previous day's trip to the Berkshires. I had a very annoying allergy attack going on most of the day. I avoided spending too much time outdoors, where the pollen would be even more potent.

When Inna woke around 9:30am, she dressed, and we walked to our nearby Tatte Bakery for breakfast. We ordered the following breakfast items:

• Boris: Matcha Latte, Croissant Breakfast Sandwich, Roasted Strawberry Tea Cake
• Inna: Latte, Croque Madame, Roasted Tea Cake

We really enjoyed our sandwiches! The Croissant Breakfast Sandwich was delicious as usual. Unlike most days, Tatte was not overly busy (probably because all the Harvard students had already graduated or departed for the summer). 

As I had a lot of meetings, I returned to our 334 Harvard Street Apartment earlier while Inna stayed at Tatte for another half hour.

Inna and I worked most of the day. During the afternoon, our apartment's water was shut off due to some repairs being done, and we could not make any hot tea. Eventually, all of the water was turned back on.

In the evening, for our last dinner in Boston, Inna, Alex, and I decided to eat at Eataly's La Pasta restaurant. Inna made reservations for 7:30pm, and we boarded a Lyft Lexus RX350 to the restaurant. We met up with Alex and sat down for our dinner, ordering the following items:

• Appetizer: Burrata & Fruita
• Alex: Niasca Limonata, Marghertita Verace Pizza, Affogato
• Boris: Lasagna Emilliana, Hot Tea
• Inna: Capriciosa Pizza, Hot Tea, Affogato

We really enjoyed our dinner, and I liked my Lasagna. Inna's Capiciosa was also quite delicious! For desserts, we shared two Affogatos, which were also delicious.

It was our last dinner in Boston, and we were sad to say goodbye to Alex, who still had 3 remaining weeks of the Summer I session at Northeastern to complete before flying back to San Jose. 

He will be taking Summer II session classes remotely from San Jose.

We took a Lyft car home to our apartment and made hot tea with the last remnants of our Russian cake.

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

I woke at around 7:37am in the morning, showered, shaved, and dressed. I opened the hamper to prepare to do laundry and purchased $5.00 worth of washing machine time (2 loads).

During the night, Inna did not sleep well due to the heat & humidity, and I turned on the air-conditioning, which seemed to help.

We planned to pack all of our suitcases and prepare for our flight from Boston to San Francisco on JetBlue #633 at 6:05pm EST (arriving in SFO at 10:00pm PST).

In the late morning, Inna and I went for our last stroll along the Charles River, noticing the calm water and the absence of students. Usually, many people are jogging along the river, but with the end of the spring semester, Cambridge was a little more empty.

After our walk, we stopped at our favorite Tatte Bakery (which was not busy at all). We ordered the following items:

• Boris: Mocha, Smoked Salmon, Avocado & Egg Sandwich
• Inna: Latte, Smoked Salmon, Avocado & Egg Sandwich

After a delicious breakfast, I returned to our apartment to unload the dryer. I decided to do laundry on the last day, so we replaced all our clothes cleanly.

We still had some cleaning to do in our apartment, including emptying all the trash and cleaning our dishes.

We ordered a Lyft at 3:40pm, but the driver arrived at about 3:50pm due to traffic. We loaded our suitcases and were taken to Boston's Logan Airport. Once through security, we ordered a few sandwiches and ate them before boarding the plane.

I read most of Mark Browder's Red Notice on the flight back to San Francisco. Here is a short summary:

November 2009. An emaciated young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, is led to a freezing isolation cell in a Moscow prison, handcuffed to a bed rail, and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes paid to the state by one of the world's most successful hedge funds. Magnitsky's brutal killing has remained uninvestigated and unpunished to this day. His farcical posthumous show-trial brought Putin's regime to a new low in the eyes of the international community.

Red Notice is a searing expose of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky's imprisonment and murder, slicing deep into the shadowy heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths. Bill Browder - the hedge fund manager who employed Magnitsky - takes us on his explosive journey from the heady world of finance in New York and London in the 1990s, through his battles with ruthless oligarchs in the turbulent landscape of post-Soviet Union Moscow, to his expulsion from Russia on Putin's orders. Browder's graphic portrait of the Russian government as a criminal enterprise wielding all the power of a sovereign state illuminates his personal transformation from financier to human rights activist, campaigning for justice for his late lawyer and friend.

With fraud, bribery, corruption, and torture exposed at every turn, Red Notice is a shocking but true political roller-coaster that plays out in the highest echelons of Western power.

When we landed around 10:00pm PST, we ordered Lyft again (as Uber was charging $150) and were finally home at around 10:45pm.