After a late night
yesterday, I woke up late this morning. As I had a meetup lunch event today in Cambridge, I decided not to do any hiking in Newton today, visiting a few interesting buildings instead.
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Fountain,
Walnut Street and Forest Street |
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| Langley Place, 10 Langley Road |
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Newton Centre Common,
Centre Street and Langley Road |
Finally, it was time to head for my lunch at
Midwest Grill in Cambridge. This is a Brazilian BBQ buffet place on Cambridge Street, and I was the first customer for the day to
arrive. Soon after, the rest of the meetup group arrived, and we started our buffet by heading to the Hot Food Brazilian BBQ and Cold Salad Station, sampling the various stews and salads they had there.
Soon after, the meats started coming on long skewers brought around by the waiters, including sausages, beef, lamb, chicken wrapped in bacon, ribs, and even chicken hearts. Upon indication, the watier will come to your side of the table and either cut off the side of meat you want, with you holding it up with a pair of tongs, or they would slide the sausage or ribs off onto your plate.
Soon, the meat was coming hard and fast, and I could barely keep up. Finally I gave up, and with the late night I had had, I was soon nodding off on the table while the others conversed around me. Even though I had thoroughly stuffed myself with food, the meal had only been about $20, which I felt was pretty good. I have to say though, that I actually preferred Pampas Churascarria on 145 East Central Street in Worcester, which thankfully is closer to me.
Next it was off to Chinatown in Boston to see the Chinese New Year Celebrations there. I decided to leave my car in its free parking spot and follow the others to take the T, walking some distance to get to
Central Square MBTA Station, which we took all the way to
Downtown Crossing, from which we walked to Chinatown. Here, the roads had been blocked off, and when we got to the center of the area, we saw several crowds of people, each surrounding a lion dance troupe performing in front of a shop or restaurant in the area. With the crowd in front of us, and me being relatively short, I could hardly see anything, but I was still able to take decent pictures of the lions, the banners and people doing kung fu moves. Pictures follow.
Some of my new friends had never seen a Chinese lion dance before, so they were asking me all sorts of questions about the tradition, like why oranges and vegetables, how do the "lions" "eat" the food, why they were all different in color, and all sorts of other questions that I was glad to answer.
After a while though, I realized that the festival was pretty much just the shops in the area paying to lion dance troupes to perform in front of them to give the shops good luck for the rest of the year. I decided to call it quits for the day then, still feeling tired from having slept only 3 hours. I took the reverse trip back to my car, passing by two churches in Cambridge along the way.
Finally back in my car, I headed back to Newton to resume sightseeing before the sun set. I managed to capture some interesting places before finally heading home for the day.
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Renovated Stone Church,
449 Newtonville Avenue |
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Newton Veterans Memorial Park,
Jackson Road and Washington Street |
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