<p>
You should ask someone at MIT to buy a 50% discounted CharlieCard for you! You barely (rarely?) break even at $59 a month…</p>
<p>Well, my husband’s company buys his, so I think of it as getting a 50% discount on mine. 
</p>
<p>Harvard only discounts them 11%, and you have to use CharlieTickets and pick them up every semester up in Cambridge. This is, IMO, not at all worth the hassle.</p>
<p>is anyone else getting sponsored for their trip to cpw? i’m not but my friend is and i wanted to see how common it is for someone to get this “travel grant” or something?</p>
<p>and do they only give it to the top applicants or just the ones that need financial aid…?</p>
<p>The travel grants are based on financial need.</p>
<p>
With MIT, if you sign up for multiple, consecutive months, you receive a CharlieCard, which can be used through all the months. If you then sign up for additional months, the same CharlieCard gets renewed. So it’s a one-time pick-up/hand-over thing. Of course, there’s also the added 39% discount.</p>
<p>That is worth the significantly lower hassle to many non-MIT people with MIT friends. :D</p>
<p>Im on a travel grant…</p>
<p>Boston’s underground is fairly intuitive like New Yorks correct? Like, its obvious which side of the platform is going where etc?</p>
<p>I mean, there are signs. I guess it’s fairly obvious if you read them.</p>
<p>@nk9230: I certainly hope it is because I have horrible sense of direction and I’ve never been to Cambridge myself before.</p>
<p>@nk9230 Are you being sarcastic? Because I can never tell in NYC which side of the platform is which!</p>
<p>That being said, I’ve also lived in Boston for almost 4 years now and I still don’t know the difference between inbound and outbound, so perhaps I’m not the best at this stuff. Figuring out which line to take is much easier than NYC, though, since our subway system is so much smaller.</p>
<p>Inbound and Outbound I thought was much less confusing than Uptown and Downtown in NYC, but maybe Boston is pretty small, so that’s why.</p>
<p>(offtopic) What’s really confusing about the NYC subway system are the express trains mixed in with the regular trains…at least we don’t have express trains in Boston (at least, not regularly - they apparently exist sometimes).</p>
<p>Inbound = toward Park Street on the Red/Green Lines, toward Downtown Crossing on the Orange Line, and toward Bowdoin on the Blue Line. Outbound is the opposite direction. For the savvy, you will realize this means a train changes from inbound to outbound when it reaches the named station, which is sort of a disaster for people who don’t know their way around already.</p>
<p>It’s easier to note the terminal station where you’re heading, and look for those signs. When you’re heading to MIT from the airport, you want the Red Line to Alewife, and if you’re heading away from MIT toward the airport, you want the Red Line to Ashmont or Braintree.</p>
<p>When in doubt, you can ask somebody standing on the platform. People in Boston pretend to be typical unfriendly jaded East Coasters, but secretly they will always help tourists if asked.</p>
<p>Sometimes trains magically turn into express, but they warn you.</p>
<p>Also it’s pretty much always Harvard –> Alewife.</p>
<p>is CPW a good time to tour around Boston? i’ve never been there</p>
<p>No, but Orientation is.</p>
<p>CPW will be too packed for you to see much of Boston, most likely.</p>
<p>I went to tour around Boston the same weekend as CPW.
Not really a wise thing. It really will be jam packed.
Of course Boston Marathon was at the same time too. However, most of the colleges had pre-frosh visiting. Even locals were commenting how crowded Boston was.</p>
<p>Cpw ends at 2 PM on Sunday. but my flight isn’t until 8PM. any suggestion on how i should kill time? I’m going with my mom and my brother (9th grade)</p>
<p>^ Visit Harvard!</p>
<p>I’m serious. lol</p>
<p>^ Take a Duck Tour :D</p>
<p>Harvard would be a good place lol</p>
<p>Duck tour sounds great too</p>
<p>since my flight leaves at 8PM with the traffic and it being a Sunday considered, when should I arrive at Logan?</p>
<p>I’ve always left EC ~2.5 hours before my flight and taken the T, and I’ve never had a problem and usually have an hour or so to kill in the airport. Logan security is fast.</p>