Boston Trip Part II: Beantown: Home of “The First”

September 29, 2006

Last weekend I went on my first exploration of Boston. Ah, what a lively and richly historic city—many parts of Boston are truly beautiful. And, as I found out over the course of the weekend, Boston contains so many "firsts" that they are difficult to count. First printing press, first public school, first swimming pool, first pub, first YMCA . . . .

The weather was beautiful when I arrived Friday after lunch. Fortunately, it was easy to navigate the shuttle to the “inbound” subway into the city.

At Logan I bought a 5-dollar subway ticket and got on the blue line, which looked like a normal New York City subway to me. I transferred to the green line at Government Center. But when the train pulled up, it consisted of only two cars! It looked stunted. Where was the rest of the train? The people were standing six-deep on the platform waiting for this train. I didn't know how we'd all fit. And we didn't. Inside, the aisle was no wider than that of a school bus. A lot of people had luggage, too, so it was a tight squeeze.

The subway cars were strange. They were more like buses – with steps leading up into the car. Within the car itself there were multiple levels of seats. I wondered how disabled people are able to navigate the subway system in Boston.

The cool thing about it was there were some very nice people on the train. One girl I struck up a conversation with was heading for an audition. She was quite beautiful with a captivating smile. And another couple I spoke with were the same nice folks I’d met on the shuttle bus earlier at Logan, who’d answered my questions about the subway.

So I felt welcomed in this city and was happy to know that the people here were very friendly and helpful, much like New Yorkers. I looked forward to my weekend.

One of the things on my to-do list was to keep an eye out for the sky rise that is featured on the ABC television show “Boston Legal,” which is one of the funnier shows on TV these days. As I stepped off the subway across the street from the nation’s first free-lending public library, I looked up to my left, and there was the famous Boston Legal building at 500 Boylston Street. I recognized the arched windows immediately. Cool!

When I checked in at the overpriced Westin at Copley Square, the clerk wrote down a rate of $185 on the paper wallet that my room card was stored in. Too bad I’d already paid $225 a night via Expedia.com for the room. It was sickening to find out I’d paid too much. The room was definitely not worth $185, much less the extra 40 bucks.

So that is the first (and last) time I use Expedia to book a hotel room. Talk about price gauging. This was Boston, not NYC. And the bathroom was barely big enough to open the door. I can’t complain about the lovely city view, though. It made me miss living in NYC even more than ever. (That sentiment continues to get stronger with every passing day since I originally left NYC eight long months ago.)

Anyway, I unpacked and then got on the “outbound” green line (subway) hoping to head out to the harbor. Since I’d come in on the “inbound” train, I assumed I needed to go back out on the “outbound.” Come to find out I was going in the wrong direction and needed to turn around. But, unlike NYC subways, you can only cross over the tracks to switch directions at specified stops, so I had to get back on the wrong train and go one stop further before I could get on the right train.

I knew the weatherman was calling for rain the next day, so I walked around downtown Boston, the harbor area, and Faneuil Hall. I cashed in my voucher for a Boston To-Go card and headed to the docks. I decided to take my harbor cruise while the sun was shining and the sky was blue. I arrived at the booth at 3:27, and the next boat was scheduled to leave at 3:30. Such timing!

The 45-minute cruise offered beautiful views of the city. There were sailboats moored everywhere. I could have gotten off at the Naval yard and toured the USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides"), but I decided to save that for a later trip. My time was limited this weekend. I wanted to learn my way around the city and see as much as I could in 48 hours.

Faneuil Hall (pronounced FAN-ill, according to one Bostonian I met) is a major tourist attraction – with lots of shops, eateries, outdoor performers, and craftsmen. I bought a purple Boston sweatshirt and roamed around the cobblestone streets. By 4:45PM I was starving, so I stopped in at a place that looked good. It turned out to be the oldest seafood restaurant in the country – Union Oyster House, built in 1826. The fresh baked Haddock was delicious. An interesting fact I overheard my waitress talking about it that this place is John Kerry’s hang-out on election days.

After that I wandered across the street to the row of standing glass towers etched with millions of serial numbers. This is the Holocaust Memorial. I realized instantly what the numbers represented. As I wandered through the site reading the survivor quotations printed on the glass, an extremely attractive man walked up to me. He wanted to know what the numbers were for. “They are the numbers tattooed to each of the victims,” I told him. The survivor stories were powerful and painful.

I did a lot of walking that evening. I don’t think I’ve seen more pubs in a single place in my life. Most were opened up to the cobblestone streets and were packed to the hilt with young revelers. I recall thinking that there was an unusually large number of young people hanging out wherever I went. Boston is a youthful city indeed. As I discovered the next day on a trolley tour, there are 53 colleges and universities in the city. Boston and Cambridge house over a quarter of a million students – with thousands more attending schools in the suburbs. That explains all the 20-somethings that I saw everywhere I went.

Stay tuned for Part III.