BAHSTAN!

For the fifth (?) time in my life I entered Beantown. Rather unwittingly however never unwillingly. It all happened with a chance conversation with a college friend, when he mentioned he had airfare credit he didn't want to lose. I was fresh off a great Habitat for Humanity trip to New Orleans, and I only had one less than rememberable night on Bourbon Street. The next week we booked flights and the hotel. Hurricane Isaac had different plans. We debated a replacement city with a combination of cost to get there, cost to stay there and ideally a place we had never been, which between the two of us is becoming increasingly difficult. Finally we decided on Boston, which happened to be a city we went to together five years earlier. We arrived at our hotel (Residence Inn, Cambridge) which was practically on the MIT campus, a part of the city I had never really experienced. We made it to the USS Constitution, and the freedom to stay organized or wander about the area was great. We elected to wander about the new museum and the boat before heading into the city proper. We headed to the opposite side of the city to go to the Sam Adams Brewery Tour, which we went on the last visit, but it made for a great photo op five years apart. Afterwards we ended up getting dinner at the Barking Crab, which had a reasonable but still expensive lobster dinner. The next day we started with a Super Duck Tour, which departed from the area by the USS Constitution. This duck tour was so much better than I ever thought it would be and I'm happy we took the time and money to partake. After that we went to the area with the Mother Church for Christian Scientists. According to my Lonely Planet guidebook, an awesome but frequently overlooked attraction lays in the Mary Eddy Baker Library, the Mapparium. For lack of a better description, when inside the Mapparium, one feels like a fish in a giant fishbowl that happens to be stained glass to a 1935 geopolitical map. At a modest fee, admission included a guided tour (the whole visit was less than an hour) and a light show across the glass shows the shifting boundaries since 1935, which is especially interesting in Africa with the shift from colonialism to sovereign rule. Our payment to enter included a walk through the Mother Church which we "what the heck" took a tour of. The sheer size of the church is so impressive and to think it's full on Sundays is hard to think of. I've been to a lot of churches all over the world and this is one of the few architecturally awesome buildings that also accounts for a massive number of seats to accommodate the flock. My travel buddy is a teacher so we had to take an opportunity to take pictures of things around Boston that would be useful later in the school year. This adventure showed me just how handy Boston's Public Transit really is. We ended the day at a bar called Miracle of Science practically on the MIT campus. It was a very friendly atmosphere and although there weren't many tables and seats, we were able to sit and chill there for hours. And the menu looks like a Periodic Table of Elements, which was reason enough for me to go. Boston is a city that grows with you, I guess in that statement most cities are. The first time in Boston, I barely left the three block radius with the hotel, the second time we were on tight budgets and if it wasn't free we had to debate if it was really worth it, and honestly, we were more concerned about getting totally sloshed every night. This last time, its not that money wasn't an object, but it wasn't tight. Staying in the city was a great experience and I couldn't imagine staying in a suburb again. And the goal of the trip wasn't to get sloppy drunk at every stop in the city. Before we left, I made my travel buddy to make a pact, that in five years, wherever life finds us, we'd go back to Boston. We'll be in our early 30s and I can't wait to see what the city feels like then.