Boston

Boston was cold. After the relative warmth of the first few days in New York this city, only four hours drive north, was a plunge back into icy winter. 75 down to 40, in the old numbers.

As a result much of what I saw in Boston was inside or underground. There was a Common, sure, because the metro passed beneath it. Harvard had a yard, rushed through on the way to one of the nearby museums.

I was in town to visit U___, a colleague from Lahore. She is studying at MassArts and is one of the many graduate students from Pakistan on Fulbright scholarships. She has almost finished her first year here, a year she found difficult and thrilling in almost equal measure.

The thrill comes from the access to research, to stuff. On Tuesday we visited the MIT Media Lab, where bright sparks and pranksters condense the future down into a physical presence. Strips of hanging paper pulse and contract as tiny electrical charges tense the single strand of bright metal that runs down their centres. Muscle wire.

There are eight legged walking machines, intelligent fabrics, ceramics as thin as tissue. Not all is bleeding edge. On the second floor is propped a lenticular panel, positioned so that as the elevator ascends the image changes. 1, 2, 3, 4. No haptic feedback, no touch screen interactivity. Just light and carefully thought out geometry.

I would like to stay longer, see more, but class is beginning and U___ must go. Outside, across a courtyard, is the titanium skinned inflorescence of a Gehry building.

MOTAT

In a building near the centre of Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology is a maze. Quite while it should be there is not clear. The rest of the building is devoted to a history of New Zealand manufacturing – boot polish and dairy products among them. There is a sign saying the floor of the maze is made of local timber, and not to run. That is all.

MOTAT is a strange collection of steam engines, trams, buses, butter churns, retired fighter aircraft and Catalina flying boats. Some are outside and can be climbed on, surreptitiously at least. Others are behind glass and perspex or cordoned off by rope. One local volunteer tips sacks of coal into the open maw of a boiler for the steam room. Another drives a trolley car around the perimeter of the nearby park, joining the old and new parts of the museum in a rickety trail.

I go there partly because it is close to J___'s house in Grey Lynne, but mainly because retired technology suits a certain otaku bent of mine. The museum does not disappoint. It is exactly the right mix of preservation, rust and engine grease. Some of the displays are absurd. The first diesel tractor in New Zealand. Others heartbreaking. Jean Batten's heroic efforts as one of the fastest female pilots of the 1920s. Her desperate attempts to claw back fame in later life, and death in isolation and obscurity in 1982.

The maze though, and this is the thing, is made entirely of mirrors. So wherever you turn you are met by hundreds of repeated versions of yourself, each iteration slightly decayed as distortion and the pale green of the glass multiplies.

It is uncanny to see your image approach and retreat in such numbers. But compelling, and both J___ and the other cousins well remember visits to the labyrinth of glass as children, more than three decades ago.