That One Where—Oh No—I Rhapsodize

Once my family and I took a road trip from New Jersey to Boston for a few days. On that journey—suffused with late-summer sunlight and the incalculable promise of being 15—I stood in a square in what felt like the middle of everything and marveled at the city around me: its simple beauty, its mixture of friendliness and belligerence, its oldness and its newness, its speed.

   I’ve lived in Boston for about five months now, but it took me until a couple weeks ago to realize that the square where I stood that summer was Copley. I realized it when I invited a friend, a Boston native familiar with the area I was researching, to come with me to Merengue, a superb Dominican restaurant in Roxbury. After eating (and, of course, taking scrupulous notes) we decided—in one of those absurdly impractical decisions you make when you’re 19 and excited about everything—to walk from Roxbury to Cambridge. Five miles at 9pm in the swirling late-January snow, the flakes like grains of sand hitting our faces, the air cold-scalding our hands and leadening our nipped feet.

    Five miles through at least that many worlds. When you walk through a city—eschewing the temperature-controlled convenience of the car ride, the ease and fragmentation of the subway, or even the more organic, wandering route of the bus—you walk through stories, lifestyles, settings, and times. The fixtures of class and race, poverty and privilege—things we often don’t want to think about—jump out at you: the liminal spaces where Asian groceries mingle with yuppie wine bars, where Latin supermarkets exist next to Whole Foods, blur in and out of focus. Neighborhoods change quickly, yet almost imperceptibly; geographic and connoted social entities connect in ways you didn’t expect. History, in all its profundity, banality, and irony is a map overlaid on the grid around you—in the architecture and the modes of transportation, in the names of the streets.

    We thought and talked of all this as, snow hissing on the ground around us, we stumbled out of the South End—my now-familiar stomping grounds—and into Copley. Thinking back to that family vacation, I recognized the familiar square. Yet it was different: before, I had been conscious only of the beauty of the place; now, after two and half weeks of living, writing, and—as my dwindling stipend constantly reminded me—eating Boston, I was conscious of its context.

    As a traveler in Boston, you have the privilege of discovering all this, like I did, for the first time. And as this project ends (for me, at least), I’d like to tell you to be curious. Eat liberally. Smile at people on the T. Don’t be afraid to ask for directions. Be polite to bus drivers. Strike up conversations. Speak other languages. Flirt. You'll be surprised by how nice people are when you take the time to really listen to them (yes, even in the Northeast).

    I hope that in every falafel you gobble, every coffee you guzzle, every tamale you linger over, and every bowl of pasta you savor, you truly taste where you are—because a city is a living entity. It tingles down to your fingertips. Hunger for it. Eat it up.