All planned

YES! OUR HOTEL HAS COMPLIMENTARY BREAKFAST. This may seem like a weird thing to get excited over, but hotel breakfast typically has things like scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, and pancakes, things that take way too much effort to make at home.
Now that that’s done, our trip has thus far been filled with sequence upon sequence of unfortunate events. Most notably, I wanted to visit both the Library of Congress and the Massachusetts State Library, but due to unfortunate timing, we were not able to visit either of them. On this day, our luck began to change. We rose early and headed straight to the Boston Public Library; we weren’t about to be defeated again. Lo and behold, it was OPEN WHEN WE GOT THERE GOD BLESS AMERICA. On a list of the top 15 “must-see” libraries, the Boston Public Library lies like sixth or something so I had rather high expectations for it. Needless to say, it delivered. Here, I saw a sight that I probably would never see in San Francisco for a wide list of reasons, rows and rows of occupied adults and businessmen sitting peacefully in a library.
Much like the other cities, an integral part of our trip lies in observance of the Chinatown districts of other cities. In Boston, we met up with a youth organization with a name eerily similar to ours, Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC). We were given a quick tour by ACDC’s tour program, See Town(C-Town, get it?), and I say quickly literally because their Chinatown honestly isn’t too big. Not too long ago, resistance against implementation of freeway routes that ran throughout Boston’s Chinatown lacked enough traction to truly be effective. Consequently, it became heavily divided and gentrified, resulting in a Chinatown that really doesn’t look too different from your everyday Downtown district. I’m not about to say that gentrification is evil and needs to be stopped, I think that is something that must be left to individual judgment. Despite the massive gentrification, community organizations like ACDC fight tooth and nail to maintain their values, playing a heavy role in the creation and sustenance of affordable housing. From the youth groups that we have met, it’s quite refreshing to see their awe-struck faces when they learn that Adopt-An-Alleyway has been established for twenty-five years. However, I truly believe that the youth of these grassroots organizations hold as much, if not more power than we do. The ability to shape a grassroots program in its initial years is one of the greatest powers you can hold. Just for the heck of it and because we weren’t about to be defeated in Boston, we returned to Skywalk Observatory. Half of the Observatory was blocked, but that half was simply a view of MIT and Harvard, which were planned visits for our trip anyway. Oh—I almost forgot. We also visited the MIT campus today, but a lot of it was blocked as it was MIT graduation day. Lisa and I ended up giving a self-tour of the MIT campus which was, to put it bluntly really, really bad. Thankfully, everybody was so tired from walking that none of them listened.
In other words, all planned :)
​-David Yi