Coolidge Corner

Coolidge Corner is our hub.  Only 3 stations down the C line, it has everything we need to survive... and by that I mean it has both a Dunkin Donuts and a Starbucks. And, of course, as long as we're alive we can enjoy some of the other shops and services Coolidge Corner has to offer, which include:

• Friendly's - where they have a very friendly burger at 10:30 at night.
• Trader Joe's - all-natural, and all over-priced.
• Best Cellars - we've never been there, because Eliya is allergic to alcohol. But it looks nice from the outside.
• The Party Store - cool store. Stay away from the cupcakes.
• Radio Shack - cool gadgets, cooler beats.
• Berry Freeze - self-serve yogurt and lots of toppings (skittles, M&Ms, oh, and fresh fruit..) = YUM!
• Peet's Coffee - good coffee, but only one hour of free wifi. Boo.  
• Coolidge Corner Gym - no thanks. We tried in Tel Aviv.
• CVS - there are two! All the pharmaceuticals we could ever want.
• Walgreens - there is one! All the pharmaceuticals we could ever want, and some. 
• Coolidge Corner Clubhouse - the spot of our first dinner in Brookline.
• And many more - you can Google it if you want (check out the link, I love it!). 

While all those options are really great, our favorite Coolidge Corner spots are:

• Panera bread - with warm soups (good for cold Boston days) and free WiFi all day, it's cool.
• Coolidge Corner Movie theater - New movies, old movies, documentries, musicals, and more - it's a pretty special theater. But because they have so much to show and not many screens you better be fast, some movies only show for a week or two!
• Brookline Booksmith - an independent bookstore with a great feel, large selection, and an entire floor of used books.

Least favorites:

• Rami Falafel - at $7 (25 Shekel) its the most expensive falefel ever.
• Staples - printing is too expensive.
• Downtown Shooz - one of the too few shoe stores in Coolidge Corner, it has way too-few styles in too-few sizes.

Hall's Pond Sanctuary

The day we moved in was a very hectic day. When the truck was finally emptied completely, a family friend helped us drop it off and gave us a ride back to town. She left us in Coolidge Corner, then a place we hardly knew at all but today, only a month later, a place we know better than any other around here. On our walk home that evening, we spotted a driveway that leads to what looked, from the street, like a really nice park. Despite our exhaustion, we simply had to check this place out, and it’s a good thing we did.

Hall’s Pond Sanctuary is a conservation area set adjacent to a baseball field with an expansive, gorgeous outfield that’s reminiscent of Central Park’s ball park. It consists of Hall’s Pond and the Armory woods, which have a winding wooden trail snaking throughout them that was renovated 5 years ago. There is also a ‘Formal Garden’ that has two wooden benches and a beautiful garden with a fountain in the middle. Alongside the edges of the conservation is a row of weeping willow trees, which quickly set your mind and soul at ease as you approach the park. And, within the conservation area itself are a variety of wildlife that are safe to live there peacefully, including a very tall and awkward-looking Blue Herron. It’s a dream! (And it’s literally across the street from our house!)

Boston Music Week

Well it's not really Boston Music Week, but I went to two classical music concerts and listened to a lot of music on my iPhone… so for me its music week.

The first concert was Sunday.  We saw the Handle and Hydn Society, featuring Eliya's brother Guy playing the cello at Symphony Hall.  The concert, titled "Mozart: A Musical Journey" naturally featured several different pieces composed by Mozart such as Eine kleine Nachtmusik. 

The second concert was at the New England Conservatory.  A giant orchestra played Stravinsky's Petrushka and Dvorak's 9th symphony.  Was really good!

Now maybe more interesting than the actual concert was how I heard about it. Meetup, a great website whose motto is: we're tired of everything being online and that our lives revolve around the screen and the fact that we must be connected 24/7.  The idea of the site is that you can create a group, or 'meetup' with any subject in mind and have people in your area meet up with you and partake in that activity.  So, for example, if you like bugs you just create a bugs meetup and anyone who's into that joins the group and meets up at least once a month. Check out which Meetup groups we're part of: Eliya, Yarin.

Boston Duck Tour

So, we survived the Boston Duck Tour and are back to tell you our tale.  These ducks, also known as DUKW, were created for the Allies during World War II as a means to unload cargo and men from ships in places where docks did not exist.  But we'll spare you the technical details.

The tour began at the Prudential Tower (at 749 feet, it's the 2^nd tallest building in Boston) where we boarded these old yet comfortable ducks.  Ours was the "Fanuel Holly", and we were lucky since our captain was actually a pirate and knows his way around town.  (Okay, with blue hair he wasn't really a pirate, but he did know his way around town.)

Our first stop was the Christian Science Church.  Supposedly there's a lot to say about this one but we'll just sum it up as an old and very interesting building.  From there we drove down Boylston Street past the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church to the Boston Public Gardens.  The Public Garden was established in 1837 when philanthropist Horace Gray petitioned for use of the land as the first public botanical garden in the United States, or at least that’s what Wikipedia says.  Anyway, we passed the Garden and Boston Commons and crossed down to the Massachusetts State House located in Beacon Hill (interesting fact: it cost $300,000 to cover its dome with 23k gold!).

From Beacon Hill we arrived at the TD Garden, home of the Boston Celtics.  From there we passed by the Museum of Science and dipped into the Charles River for the wet part of the journey.  As we crossed under the Longfellow Bridge into the Charles River basin we were able to see a great view of Cambridge to our right and downtown Boston to our left. 

As we returned to land we passed by Bunker Hill on our way to the North End, home of Paul Revere.  From there our return back to our starting point took us by Quincy Market, the Old State House, Cheers (where everybody knows your name), and Newbury Street. Oh, we also passed by the John Hancock building with super reflective glass. Look, that’s us!

Obviously we learned one main thing from this trip: there are lots of sites to see in Boston and that all of these spots may have been just a bit too much to cover in this post (Especially without photos. What can we do? Sometimes you’ve got to stop snapping photos from within a moving vehicle for the sake of safety.) But fear not! We’ll elaborate on all of these pretty places in future posts (we promise).

Welcome

Hi, and welcome to our blog! We recently relocated to Brookline Mass from far, far away (not Mars, if that’s what you had in mind...) and we’re here to share with you our experiences out and about on the town. So, we’ll start at the beginning.

Somehow (poor planning, maybe?) it ended up that only the two of us were left to unpack the contents of our 14-foot U-Haul into our 2^nd-floor apartment. As you can imagine, we were thrilled, but we were even more thrilled when, about halfway in (to the truck, that is), a group of kind-hearted strangers agreed to help us carry our gigantic (and rather heavy) dresser upstairs. We were even more thrilled when two of them decided to stick around and help us unload the rest of the truck, even though all we could offer them in return was some water and double-stuffed Oreos (not too bad, right?). That was most definitely a very warm welcome into our new town.

Our apartment is on Beacon Street in Brookline, which is the town’s (or city’s?) main road upon which are situated various ‘centers’ – large intersections with cafes and shops, and the essentials like CVS and supermarkets. We’re a 15-minute walk from what we think is the nicest of these centers – Coolidge Corner. Coolidge Corner is the intersection of Harvard Street and Beacon, and Harvard street is home to many a’fine places, like Peet’s Coffee, CVS (and Walgreens), the synagogue we joined, Starbucks (of course), Dunkin Donuts (of course), even Rami’s Falafel. There are a bunch of other nice things there, like the Coolidge cinema, and we’re thrilled that it’s so close to where we live. (We’ll see how often we take the walk or even the T ride once winter sets in, though!)

A 15-min walk in the other direction gets you into the city of Boston, right by Fenway Park (How cool?). While we haven’t yet been to a baseball game, we have explored the area a bit and we’re excited about how close we are to all the city has to offer, yet still far enough away that we don’t live within the city's noise and pollution, and general lack of green (although some areas of Boston are quite green and beautiful).

So there you have the general overview of the area in which we live. More to come later on some interesting explorations...