Continuing on with this oh so exciting TR ....
Thursday Sept 2 - We lounged around the room in the morning a bit. I went and picked up some caffeine and pastries for us for breakfast from Cafe Nero. I am in love with this coffee chain...the coffee is good, and the atmosphere is a cut above the rest. But....because...covid...I didn't dine in...I got our breakfast to go and headed back to our hotel room. I suppose for me anyway, one positive to travelling during a pandemic...the pace is a little more relaxed. We didn't dine in restaurants as much, we did a lot more lounging around...and didn't do as many touristy things as I would normally pack into a trip like this....trying to make the best of it lol
After breakfast we ended up wandering around and checking out some of the Suffolk University buildings in the area to see where my son would have most of his classes and probably be hanging out a lot. At his school they have this account called RAM account which is a flexible account - that is loaded on the same card as your meal plan, and then can be funded for use on things like books, laundry, printing, and it's also accepted at some nearby CVS, Whole Foods and some restaurants in the area. The one thing my son is really excited about is that it's accepted on Grub Hub. My kid LOVES food delivery. We opted to get him the lowest meal plan and then load the extra funds on this RAM account so he can indulge once in a while. But I told him if he blows through that there is no reloading until after holidays because he has a meal plan that won't let him starve!
ANYWAY...to make a long story longer...we wanted to load money onto his RAM account. On first glance, this seemed like a simple matter of anyone being able to enter a credit card into the RAM loading portal and adding funds...however....when you are a Canadian going to school in the US....and have a Canadian billing address for your credit card...nothing is ever simple. I learned this several times while my son was in boarding school in the US but for some reason I had hoped that Suffolk being quite a diverse school with lots of international students....would not have the same issues...sigh. So after realizing that loading funds may not be a simple matter, we walked over to the bursar's office to see if there were any alternatives for loading funds onto said RAM account. The bursar was a super nice guy, but after much discussion...the only viable alternative seemed to be...cash or a money order. Ugh. I hated the idea of taking out a bunch of US cash and then carrying it back to the bursar's office and lining up etc again. But while that would have been a pain, the bigger issue is that I would not have been able to load funds on his account remotely once I was no longer with him in Boston, in case of emergency of course! Anyway...we headed over to the post office to try to get a money order...and that failed as well - turns out to get a US money order at a post office...you have to have an American mailing address. We tried CVS...where we could have gotten a money order...but only with cash!! Ugh...So just as we were literally entering the foyer of a bank to go withdraw a bunch of US dollars...my son's phone rings and it was the lovely guy from the Bursar's office!! He said he was determined to figure this out because we can't be the only ones with this issue. He was able to figure out that if we leave the address field's blank when entering the credit card info online for the RAM account...it works!!!
We thanked him profusely and we were so lucky that he called at just the right time!! We headed back to the hotel since I had my laptop with me, and gave it a try, and it worked!! So now my son has enough on there for his books and a few orders on grub hub, and will hopefully use it for laundry once in a while too!!
That took up the majority of the morning. We wandered over to Quincy Market to look for some lunch. Of all the delectable things on offer...my son went with a hot dog from this place called "the Doghouse". It was starting to get busy and I didn't want to line up twice so I ended up with...a cheese dog lol. Not my finest hour but it was a pretty good cheese dog and hit the spot actually. We had plans to meet up with some family in the afternoon so we headed back to the hotel for a bit after looking around the area a bit and watching some street performers.