Flying out of Boston at night was a bit of a humbling experience. The view from the window as the plane dipped to the left was almost worth the cost of the flight alone. You can go into a city a million times and see everything there is to see, but you're missing a vital part of the city if you've never seen it from above. The entire coast and inland is lit up in gold as far as I can see; it's a comforting sight to consider while flying into and over utter blackness. The fact that you can call a city a city, singular, one entity, is amazing when you consider the diversity of the people in it, the range of actions taking place, each separate building and road and park, each community and neighborhood, not to mention its history - what is is and all that it has been - and it's all one city, it's all Boston, a tiny spot a map - it's not an easy concept to grasp, but flying above it and seeing it in a stark dichromatic gold and black really helped.
It also helped bring home where I was going and what I was doing, which is nice now that I have time to really consider that.
