Mark attack!

Last Friday we were hit with an incoming storm of MARK FAY descending into Boston.  Four days of fun festivities followed, mostly involving dinosaurs, Dominion, and a terrible monster called a "Shell."

Mark's general feelings about the Shell

Okay, so the Shell monster is actually just a monstrous homework project.  Mark had some pretty intense CS project going on, but fortunately he was here at MIT with Matt, and so the two of them were able to argue to their hearts' content about piping issues and loops and code and Lord knows what.  I smiled and nodded a lot.  Seriously, it was hilarious to see the brothers back together arguing about computer-y things.  Felt like home, except without Jenna splayed across the hallway or a small soccer ball for mark to kick all over the place. 


When the boys weren't attempting to slay the Shell, we wandered around Boston and played fun games.  The first place we went was Chinatown for Dim Sum on for lunch on Saturday.  We went with a big group of our students from the dorm and it was super fun. 

Taking Chinatown by storm.

The big trip we took was to the Boston Museum of Science.  They were hosting an amazing Pompeii exhibit, which was beautiful, interesting, at times heart-wrenching and at others just plain hilarious.  The exhibit included pottery, statues, jewelry, and frescoes recovered at Pompeii.  Hands down our favorite moment was this guy's expression:

WHAT THE?!

This guy is Silenus, the satyr who mentored the Roman god of wine and revelry, Bacchus.  His expression here is a reaction to a young, comely Bacchus totally feeling up some hot maenad.  Silenus was basically watching behind some bushes.  The Romans were so crazy, they just had this sort of stuff on their walls throughout the house, totally casual about it. 

Two young women

The real centerpiece of the exhibit, though, were the body casts.  We came upon them abruptly--it was all fun and games and Silenus, and then, suddenly, full body casts of people and animals in the moment of death by volcano. Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures.  Flash photography was not allowed and that part of the exhibit was in particularly dark lighting to preserve the plaster and whatnot.  This is a picture I pulled off the web of one of the casts we actually saw at the museum.  Here's the deal with the body casts: archaeologists have been excavating Pompeii for over a hundred years.  They noticed there were sometimes hollowed out parts of the plaster.  Some brilliant man had the idea to pour plaster into these crevices, and then excavate them out.  What they discovered was that the hollows were actually places where bodies (human and animal) had decomposed after being covered in hardened ash.  The plaster casts, then, depicted the shape the bodies left behind, often down to the details of facial expression and, in some cases, folds of clothing.  It was a powerful experience to walk among these figures.

Buuuuut you know that serious mood didn't last long.  Pretty much as soon as we were out of the Pompeii exhibit, Matt and Mark were whining at me: "Emilyyyyyyyyy.  We wanna see the Dinosaaaaaaaaaurs."  And so we finally found our way down to the dino section, complete with full scale T-Rex model and a fossilized triceratops skeleton.

I think Mark is trying to imitate the triceratops's expression

Being super manly, chillin with a T-Rex

Most of the rest of the weekend we were just hanging out around Cambridge and in the dorm.  We played several rounds of board games with the students, mostly Dominion, which as it turns out we all LOVE.  It's a deck building card game that *feels* very much like a board game, and the combination of cards you play with changes every time, so the game is always changing.  Matt and I learned how to play with some new friends of ours on Thursday night, we introduced it to Mark and our students on Friday, and by Saturday everyone was hooked.  Awesome.

So it turned out to be a great weekend and fun was had by all.  Mark got to experience all the awesome things about our life at MIT (except he got stuck with our not-so-awesome couch...).  We even caught a glimpse of some typical MIT hacking culture.  At MIT, hacking is harmless practical jokes, often involving some hilarious alteration to campus landmarks.  Here, a modern art sculpture of a man made out of numbers turned into none other than HARRY POTTER!!!

Potter by numbers

...or is it that MIT is really Hogwarts and we just haven't been telling you??!  (Shhh, Mark, we're counting on you not to tell the Muggles about us!)

Magically yours,
-Emily