剑桥，哈佛和MIT

Another day my family and I visited the infamous Harvard University. I was pretty excited because of the movie “Legally Blonde”, but I also set my expectation bar high. It frustrated me that there was so many wandering crowds everywhere and it was the exact opposite of Dartmouth College’s dewy grass, bushy trees, chirping birds and soft breeze. People were falling over themselves to take pictures in front of the statue of John Harvard and touch his feet, which was ‘supposed to make you smarter’. Meanwhile, I amassed a crowd ball-shaped house finches by throwing bits of bread. They seemed a lot more interesting than the boring burgundy brick buildings that added together were Harvard.

However, Harvard’s Museum of Natural History’s exhibits and air conditioning was amazing enough to tweak my annoyed thoughts on the university. It wasn’t a zoo, where they just trapped animals for little children’s delight and where I feel sympathy for every species. It was a huge collection of species on Earth, from prehistoric to modern, tiny bug to bony dinosaur, from preserved in a liquid-filled glass to life-like on the ground. Every single exhibit - and there must have been hundreds - were so detailed and congruent to its much more alive brother. Tiny details, such as little hairs on the trunk of an African elephant or tiny feathers on a red-necked hummingbird, sometimes made me wonder if the animals were real. As if they were darted and put on display and sprayed with preservatives.

They were separated in different rooms based on their habitats. In some of the rooms, the animals were placed beside fake trees and potted plants with natural sounds on the audio system, or in water-looking glass hiding in coral. My favourite was the Boreal room, but I might have been a little biased because the animals were all from Canada. But in that room there was a protective grizzly bear, a tall moose stood antlers raised, and my favorite animal, the wolf, puffing with pride from curious authority. How could I not enjoy a room with beasts like that looking upon me?

After a bit of debating and a scrumptious pizza feast at Otto’s, we decided to take a subway to Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). Everyone there had a sharp look in their eyes. I saw the actual university which was was fine and dandy, but I was especially impressed by the Technology Building. It looked more like a committed science museum or the Mad Hatter’s Haberdashery and Tea Shop, the way misshapen, splendid bits of building jutted out with even more jutting out windows. It curved in and out and looked way too wacko to be on a good university’s campus, but I was also glad it was there since it sort of proved adults and smart people still have a sense of humour and fun. A student - who was also, undoubtedly sharp - told us “the building is crazy from any angle, inside out”, so in the inside I imagined it to have black and white marble floors like a chessboard and random, high tech computers and TV screens everywhere. I let my imagination fly and I decided the building definitely had giant lightbulbs, human looking robot cops with hidden cameras, and a lounge of the next generation sofas. Probably even those really high tech projectors that create a hologram blueprint you can edit in the air, mini microbe robots that crawl inside your body and heal you up, and even magical red telephone booths like in Harry Potter. Probably.Read more