Amateur actors perform dancing in raps to pedestrians in downtown Boston. [Photo By Hu Yongqi/China Daily]

From ivory towers to Manhattan and on to the wild west.

This was going to be a three-city trip with an eclectic mix of attractions: two bastions of academia, the bright lights of the big city and cowboys. The cities: Boston, New York and Dallas.

After having lived in another big city, Beijing, for the past 10 years, the time seemed ripe to recharge my brain cells by seeing something a bit different. At the same time I was keen to make up for something I had failed to do four years ago, when I studied in Hawaii for about a year: see some of the mainland.

Like the millions of other Chinese who visit the United States each year as tourists - last year 2.81 million went there - I had a wish list of things I wanted to do there. The main thing was that having lived in Hawaii, I was keen on seeing the other side of the country, and my girlfriend, fascinated by cowboy culture, was keen on going out west. We would be traveling with two other people.

In summer, the US embassy in Beijing is crammed with Chinese applying for student visas for the coming semester. With this in mind, my friend booked our return flights from Beijing to Boston a month before we were due to leave. The same day I filled out an application on the embassy's website but realized that if things followed their normal course the visa could not be granted until five weeks later.

Enter an online visa agent offering a service for 1,800 yuan ($280) that would ensure, apparently with the help of an insider at the embassy, that the visas would be in our hands well before our departure date. After an anxious wait, I was granted a 10-year multi-entry visa a week or so later.

The choice of Boston as our first stop came down to the fact that all four of us like universities, and two of the world's most famous, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are in nearby Cambridge, on the northern banks of the Charles River. Both have more than their fair share of alumni who have gone on to make a huge impression on the world, whether in business, medicine, politics, science or some other field. The 30 Nobel Prize winners that Harvard has produced is eloquent evidence of that. One who is well known to Chinese is basketballer Jeremy Lin. His success, gaining a degree in economics then going on to play in the NBA has inspired many Asians studying and working in the US, or dreaming of doing so.

One of the first things that may strike any Chinese visiting Harvard or MIT is that, unlike Chinese universities, they are not enclosed within walls, but are wide open and resemble small towns. A visit to small lecture rooms in which MIT students studied and debated brought back to me my university days 10 years ago.