What could possibly be better than flying to Boston, the most Irish city outside of Ireland, to spend St. Patrick's Day weekend? Taking the bus instead! Crazy as it may seem, I decided that spending 14 hours overnight on a bus was the best way to travel to Boston. So I jumped on a bus around 11pm on Thursday night, and slowly made my way. It had been a while since I'd taken the bus anywhere, but it's much as I remembered it (especially when trying to sleep). It is possible to sleep. If you don't mind sleeping for 20 minutes at a time, waking up for a few minutes, remembering that you are indeed on a bus and trying to sleep, only to repeat this vicious cycle all through the night. It's like trying to smoke a cigarette that you put out and relight after every drag. In any case, the bus ride there was largely uneventful and I safely arrived at South Station in Boston.

Let me say a few things I learned about Boston's public transportation system as the weekend went on. Boston proudly has the first subway in North America. And some of the tracks and stations look like they've never been upgraded since they were built. Despite this fact, the trains do run more or less regularly (much the same way streetcars do in Toronto - nothing for a while, then 6 in a row). The strangest thing I found was paying for trips. Some lines you don't have to pay if you're at a certain point and leaving the downtown area. Sometimes you can even haggle the price on surface routes. I'm sure the bus operators take great pleasure in watching tourists try to figure out if they need to pay 90 cents or $1.25 for a trip.

Once I managed to meet up with Jen at the station, we took the subway and what could only be called a hybrid between a subway and a streetcar out to her place. The first thing I did was have a shower (14 hours on a bus is not hygenic), and then took a nice nap for a couple of hours before heading back into the city to meet up with some of Jen's coworkers for a beer. We ended up at a micro-brewery across the street from Fenway park (which unfortunately wasn't open so I couldn't get a peek inside at the big green wall). They had some nice ales, and a few people even grabbed a blueberry flavoured beer (with fresh blueberries floating inside). I wasn't too keen on the fruity beer that looked like a reject from a bubble tea house, but it seemed to go over well with the others.

After a couple drinks and some dinner, we managed to convince a couple more people to join us in a trip to South Boston to try to find some authentic St. Patrick's Day celebrations. Unfortunately, things didn't work out quite as planned. For one, I think we were all expecting to walk out of the subway station and find a row of Irish bars just waiting for us. But we weren't in Dublin, we were in South Boston. So we got a long row of closed shops, and a few scattered bars. We stopped at one place right by the subway, but it was more like a sports bar. After a quick pint, we continued up the street. As we were walking, a carload of what we assume were locals yelled out the window calling us "Yuppie Scum!". Apparently the area is being gentrified and a lot of condo style apartments and townhouses are going up, and the locals aren't terribly pleased about it!

We must have continued a mile up and down the main strip, found one ok place, a couple places with huge lineups, and yet another place that didn't even have a name, looked really dodgy. Of course, we found that last place after walking in the freezing wind for half an hour, and decided it'd be better to warm up for a bit. So in we went - and we found the real South Boston. All the kegs were dry (it was only 10pm). They were serving Budweiser bottles. Two old Irish men were playing pool on a dingy table. Guys were coming out of the bathroom asking to be hit in the head because they'd only been hit a few times that night - and of course, they were obliged and took it like a real Southie would. Suffice to say we finished our drinks and left before we became a new target.

We ended up just going back to the first place (which was literally steps from the subway) to have a few more pints. Suddenly it was last call - at midnight, no less. Not too shocked, we finished our drinks and headed back into the city, a little defeated at not quite finding what we were looking for, but I think all in all we all had a good time and experience.

Saturday morning started with a much clearer head than I had hoped. Jen took me down to an area called Jamaica Plains, which is a bit south and west of the downtown, to a place called Sorella's, which apparently has the best breakfast in the city. The wait wasn't too long, about 20 minutes (after a 20 minute walk and bus ride to get there). The service was terribly slow, it took more than 15 minutes just to order our food. When the food did arrive, I was so famished I just wolfed everything down, barely registering the fact that it wasn't too bad at all. One of the highlights was the dozen or so choices of bread for the french toast. Cherry walnet, sourdough, blueberry, pumpkin, I can't remember the rest. I saw pumpkin and went right for it. It just about made the wait worth it!

Nicely fueled up, we headed downtown to take in some historical sites. Boston celebrated it's 375th anniversary last year, so they have quite a rich history. Paul Revere, Benjamin Franklin, Samual Adams, and countless other famous people from American history lived and are buried in Boston. So of course the best site we could think of to start off at was the site of where they filmed the entrance for Cheers! I never really cared for history much anyway. I heard they had one heck of a tea party once ...

After a pint at Cheers (which looks nothing like the TV show on the inside of the bar), we wandered a bit more, headed towards the harbour area, taking in the sites but not really paying too much attention to the significance of them. We did find the cemetery where the above mentioned were buried. Most of the headstones are so old the weather has worn the carvings in them to almost nothing. It was just so very old, and a bit creepy, so we didn't stick around long. We ended up near the harbour and stopped at a pub called The Black Rose (a.k.a. Roisin Dubh). The pub is famous for Irish music (live artists 7 days a week for the past 25 years) and have included John Denver and, at the time, some relatively unknown member of U2. The Black Rose has also been touted as pouring Boston's best pint of Guinness, and serves more Guinness than any other single restaurant-bar unit in the United States. So of course we were obliged to stop in and have a pint of Guinness. Can you see the theme for the weekend? It was St. Patrick's weekend after all! (It was a fantastic pint of Guinness too)

A quick trip back to Jen's for a rest after walking around for hours, and we headed back into the city with her roommates to the North End, which is primarily the Italian community. It's kind of difficult to describe the area, there are a lot of windy streets closely crowded with 3 and 4 story buildings, a lot of which look like brownstone walkups. It's very easy to get lost, which we managed to do for a short while before getting some directions from a pizza shop. Our destination? La Summa, a very authentic Italian restaurant that was recommended by Julie, one of Jen's roommates. And I do mean authentic. The meal was so incredible, it was the best tasting Italian food I've ever had outside of my Nonna's kitchen. Almost everything was freshly prepared and made, including most of the pasta dishes. We started with appetizers of cheese ravioli, and arancini, which are balls of risotto stuffed with cheese and meat and then deep fried. I could have eaten just them for the rest of the meal, they were so incredible. I had gnocchi for the main course. If anyone has had fresh gnocchi before, you know how much different it can be from store bought. It just melts in your mouth, I almost couldn't stop eating it. But I knew I had to save room for desert. I wasn't going to be at such a wonderful place like that and not order tira misu. Forget the arancini and the gnocchi, this was the piËce de rÈsistance. Words cannot describe how good this tira misu was. The entire meal was so incredible, I would go back to Boston just to dine at this place again!

After dinner Jen, Julie and I headed back to near where the Black Rose is, an area called Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market. Think St. Lawrence Market and Kensington Market mixed together, but mucher nicer looking. Jen and I had passed through there earlier in the day, but now we returned to try to check out some live music. We heard some nice music coming from the upper level of one of the buildings, a placed called Parris. We made our way up (and actually into the club for about a minute) not knowing that on the other side of the building was a long lineup for Parris and the adjoining bar. We decided the hour wait wasn't worth it, and just found live music at Dick's Last Resort. The music wasn't bad, however the guys sitting at the table were sufficiently drunk on 32oz bottles of Bud Light (I kid you not) to make it a bit annoying, especially for the girls. We left and went into another place across the market that was a bit quieter and had an acoustic duet that were playing some Fleetwood Mac and some other familiar stuff that I couldn't quite place. Once again, last call was at midnight, and I began to wonder what all the university and college students did with their spare time. Probably study. I guess that's why Harvard and M.I.T. are such renowned schools. Boring.

Sunday should have been pretty simple. Get up, get to the bus, hope on the bus, go home. So I missed the St. Patrick's Day parade, not a big deal, I just didn't feel like getting back into the city at 9am on Monday morning and head straight to work. Of course, nothing ever works out as planned. Upon arriving at the bus station, we found a lineup for the bus that was easily over 100 people. The average Greyhound bus holds 55 passengers. At first we thought the crowd was just from the weekend, but I later found out that Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo colleges all had their March Break the week before, and the students were returning to school in droves. A huge credit goes to Greyhound for organizing extra buses to get us all to Albany at least, and from there 4 buses instead of the normal one managed to bring everyone to Syracuse, where the first transfer was. Of course, delays insued, and I was certain I'd miss my connection and get be stuck in Syracuse for several hours. I did manage to catch the bus with only a few minutes (not enough to get dinner of course, which was the original plan). The experience was much the same upon arriving for the 2nd transfer in Buffalo - normally a half hour stop, I was stepping off the bus as they instructed all people bound for Toronto that their bus was loading already. So a 14 hour trip with a couple half our stops for transfers turned into a continuous journey with no meal or washroom breaks (aside from the one on the bus of course). I did however get back to Toronto at 2am (on time for that trip) even if I was a bit hungry and rough around the edges.

Apparently where the Devil is.   more »

Well I tried doing a brief update a couple months ago   more »

It's amazing how much things can change in just a month   more »