Kilgore Trout
New Member
On a chilly weekend in mid-November, I went down to Boston for a weekend with my girlfriend and a friend. We rented a Toyota Yaris, drive down on Friday afternoon and then left on Sunday evening.
This was my seventh trip to Boston, but my first visit since 1999. Boston was the first "real" city (that is to say big, established and effortlessly urban) I visited as a kid. It was interesting to see how today's Boston compared to the Boston of my memory. It felt smaller and quieter than when I was a kid, no doubt because I've gotten used to living in a similarly-sized city. It also felt a lot more polished and gentrified. The only ragtag place left in central Boston seems to be Chinatown.
Still, I had a great time. We couch-surfed with a bunch of guys in Allston (not frat boys --- comedy improv geeks!), wandered around the city, shopped, ate good food, met up with an old friend for drinks and generally enjoyed ourselves. We concluded that Boston is a uniquely terrible place for smoking shisha (one sterile-looking place in Allston was charging $35 for a hookah!) but a truly excellent place for drinking good beer. We came across one place with 120 beers on tap and a menu that noted each one's beeradvocate.com score. Amazing. The only problem is that bars in Boston close at 1am.
Considering I drove more than 10 hours that weekend and that the sun set at 4pm every day, we packed an awful lot of stuff into our short time in Boston. We wandered around Allston, Boston University, Kenmore Square, Back Bay, downtown, Beacon Hill, the North End, Chinatown, the South End, Central Square, Harvard Square and Davis Square.