Bike trail + Boston Marathon

I'm a little late for this post, but it was a busy week...
Last weekend we tried something different around Boston: there are lots of bike trails that you can take and get to know either the city of Boston or its surroundings. For the one we decided to take we had to go until the last station of the red line subway and there you are in a point where you can choose: in one direction you go inside Boston and in the other, you go outside. We took the outside direction. It's a really nice program: the road is paved and pretty flat, which makes it accessible to children and also elderly. At the same time it can be a long way and there are points where you can go inside the woods, what makes it more challenging. Of course we tried everything, and it was a lot of fun!! In our way back we stopped in Arlington, a small  and charming city where we had lunch in an italian restaurant. The trail actually follows a pathway with historical spots, where the American Revolution began in April 1775. Really a pleasant program for the weekend, totally recommend.
On Monday there was Boston Marathon, a big event, stopped the city! We went to Boyslton street, close to the end of the ride to watch it. The streets were crowded and everybody seemed to like it a lot. Later there was a ride for normal people (not athletes), so the event kept going until late evening  on Monday.
So, as usual, a busy weekend for Boston...

American Easter!

Happy Easter!!
Ok, so they don't have a whole week as a holiday, but Easter is also like a family celebration for them! Ms. Godleski, Mrs.Godleski's (one of the teachers in the program) wife, kindly invited us over to spend the Sunday with their family, have lunch with them and help in the egg hunt!
Her house was really something: so full of decoration details, painted eggs everywhere, Happy Easter stickers, bunny toys and nice prepared tables to fit all of us in their living room. Their traditional food is ham and sausages, which were really well cooked plus mashed potatoes and some vegetables served with some wine and Brazilian Guaraná (something we'll never find in Brazil...).
For dessert we had cupcakes, baked by her granddaughter and several different cookies that the girls had taken. The conclusion is that we spent about 3 hours eating and chatting and having a great time. Not to mention the music: they played a brazilian selection!
After that we hid the eggs so the younger kids would look for them! It was a lot fun, for us and for them! Maybe more for us =)
It was a wonderful day! We only missed our real chocolate eggs, the big ones! But we can live without them for now...
Thank you Mr. and Ms. Godleski!!

starting the week

Another both sunny and rainy Sunday is coming to its end. This cold is kind of hard to handle now that we tasted a little bit of the warm spring weather...Anyway, today we went out for a walk until Harvard Square to enjoy the shy sun in the morning. There was a group walking going on, leaving the Harvard Athletics and going along the margins of the Charles river. It was in favor of "a world without MS (Multiple Sclerosis)". Lots of people were involved and there was music, played by an excited fanfare all dressed with that crimson jackets! Hopefully it will have a good impact over the research against this challenging disease.
Harvard Square is quite an exciting place on weekends. Lots of foreign people are walking around with their maps, speaking different languages and mixing to all the university life. It seems that there's always something going on and it feels good walk around all of this.
It's almost Monday and this happens to be a really important week in the lab. About 4 weeks ago we started a kind of pilot to an experiment which had some new ideas. While the group was catching up to what we should do and how to make things work at the lab, we started to have actually really good results, so we invested in these ideas. It took us a couple of weeks to get on track of our functions and execute them properly, but now we can say it's almost boring to do the experiments...Hopefully this week we'll do the last of a series of experiments to complete a study and finish the analysis of the acquired data.
I'll let you know how it goes!