Psycho Chicken Crosses the Road
Created | Updated Sep 22, 2003
I've been to Boston before. Once. For a weekend. The unfortunate thing is that I drank so much that I have very patchy memories of the nights, and the days were spent in a hungover haze. Hardly the best way to see what is almost certainly the most beautiful city in America. So, I pledged when I left that time that one day I would return, and experience Boston properly. I kept my word.
Saturday
Most hotel rooms are equipped with tourist bumph, and it's always worthwhile perusing it. The usual leaflets and stuff are superceded in every respect by any guidebook you may have brought with you, but the current events stuff is always useful. Dougie discovered that there was en event happening across town that weekend known encouragingly as 'Brewstock' - a beer festival at the local microbrewery 'Harpoon'. Right, that's the evening sorted out. Plus, Bill was arriving in town this afternoon, so it was all working out rather nicely.
However, we needed a good breakfast before anything like that, so we dropped into 'The Pour House', simultaneously a bar and a diner, across the street for the traditional American lard-fest that is - Breakfast.
Breakfast in America (apart from being an album by Supertramp) is usually eggs-and-. Chicagoans have an expression I rather like : they meet up for 'coffee-and-' which is basically coffee and whatever cake, bagel, muffin or other fattening accompaniment grabs your attention at the counter. Well, breakfast could similarly be described as 'eggs-and-' here.
For me it's got to be eggs-and-sausage, as if there's one thing Americans can't do it's bacon. I could make a fortune, as they seem to fry up the fat that I normally cut off bacon and serve it up as breakfast. No thanks, I'll take the sausage. Stick a big pile of home-fries with that, and a toasted bagel, and we're good to go. The Pour House speciality breakfast is known as 'the piglet', and comes as the 'pan piglet' (the European food mountain, plus pancakes), 'the ham piglet' (I daren't ask, but I envisaged a whole roasted pig with an apple in its mouth, surrounded by pancakes, fried eggs and home fries) and a couple of other variations, none of which I could even contemplate having struggled to finish the standard breakfast. Lunch was to be a formality today.
But a good hearty start was required, for today we were going to venture on the T to Cambridge, home of MIT and Harvard, and the generally bohemian, studenty part of town before meeting Bill mid afternoon. Emerging from the T station we were in a city square, which frankly could have been Oxford or even Stratford in England. There was an area known as 'The Pit' which is popular among street performers and disenfranchised teens. As I sat there for five minutes I counted about 12 goths with an average of 5 visible piercings each. Oh, and some bloke with a guitar murdering Beatles songs for the punters of a nearby cafe. The way they all mingled with the beautiful people in the expensive cafes was curious to say the least, but I would work that one out later.
Cambridge
First stop was Harvard university, which had witnessed its graduation ceremony the day before, so was a bit of a bomb site. As people tried to move huge piles of folded chairs and pull down marquee tents, we wandered around the very impressive buildings. The first thing that strikes you about Harvard is that it's actually quite small. I think it's a bit like Woodstock - if everyone who said they went there had, the place would have been five times bigger. We also got passed by a jogger who was wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan 'stay up all night with quantum physics'. These student types just crack me up...
As you know I've never been one for tourist sights, so we meandered down the street to get into the atmosphere of Cambridge a little more.
Cambridge is what would happen if students ruled the world. You'd have The Pit, where all the goths and geeks could hang out and be individual together, and occasionally nip into Starbuck's for a tall skinny latte. There's a street which, after about half a mile of solid bookshops, turns into about half a mile of solid second hand record shops, some of which bore an uncanny resemblance to 'Championship Vinyl' from High Fidelity. Shops called things like 'Little Tibet' sell dodgy tie-dyed clothes and 'ritual items' (whatever they are) from behind bright beaded curtains in the street, and every so often a middle aged, long haired man wearing sandals plays 'Mr Tambourine Man' or something on a battered old acoustic guitar at you. It's nice.
After a while I came to the conclusion that most of the inhabitants are all just pretending. They don't buy stuff from 'Little Tibet' - they buy it from the designer stores down in Back Bay. They have loyalty cards for the Virgin Megastore, and frankly wouldn't touch a second hand book for fear of who's cistern it had been behind before. You get the impression that it's all just an act, so that the rich kids who go to Harvard can pretend to be poor and bohemian and hang out in coffee shops and stuff like normal students do, when really, they could be jumping on Daddy's private jet to spend the weekend in his house on Martha's Vineyard.
Having said that though, it was a very pleasant place to stroll around. We did find a rather nice coffee house in the guidebook, which evidently wasn't in the other guidebooks, as I suspect we were the first tourists to make it that far down the street without getting drawn into Little Tibet's sale rack. 1369 Coffee Shop sits on a junction where the poor students' massive 4x4s jostle for right of way in front. A middle-aged bearded man is sitting outside complaining because the wind has blown his guitar over, so now he can't play Mr Tambourine Man anymore. I swear I saw three people reading (brand new) Ray Bradbury books. Everyone except us is wearing sandals. But the mocha is fantastic, as is the accompanying blueberry muffin.
I got up to use the loo. Un-necessary detail there, I know, but inside the bathrooms the walls are plastered with Vogon standard poetry, presumably scrawled there by regulars. One piece in particular caught my eye and summed not just 1369 up, but actually a lot of Cambridge. It read:
'This place is full of old, stinking hippies. I couldn't love it more'
'Ladies and gentlemen, the next Poet Laureate.'
'It's Beer-o'clock' - Brewstock
Our little trip through Boston's Studentville lined us up perfectly for time to meet up with Bill back at the hotel. His arrival was slightly more as planned than ours, and the rendezvous worked out fine. 10 minutes after the scheduled meeting time, we were in Dasiy Buchanan's having an introductory beer. Our plan for the beer festival that evening took even less time to sell to Bill, a seasoned Oktoberfester himself. Barbeque was promised at the festival, so dinner was organised too.
Brewstock was happening right at the brewery site. For reasons which Edinburgh is yet to fathom, breweries don't tend to be in city centres. This one was however, right next to Boston's World Trade Centre, thankfully still intact. The T took us to South Station, where the brewery had kindly laid on buses to ferry revellers to and from the brewery itself. We followed people who looked as confused as us, and were making references to 'buses' and 'beers', and successfully located the bus to the festival. A 10 minute journey and we were there.
I guess I'm a little spoiled when it comes to beer festivals. The festivals we have here in the UK offer, without a doubt, the finest ales on the planet, while the mega Oktoberfest in Munich offers the finest pilsner, and the best party on Earth. 'Brewstock' seemed to be completely disorganised. Their system of buying little wooden tokens to exchange for beer was OK (indeed, I wondered if a wooden-token-for-beer system couldn't be adopted in the outside world. It would certainly make life simpler) but the lines for the 4 beers on offer were hectic, and people were not moving away from the bars once they had their beer to allow others to taste the good stuff. Add an extremely loud rock covers band (who might have been good, were they not amplified to stadium levels in a marquee) and the main tent area was completely un-inhabitable. Fortunately the outside area was slightly more hospitable, and also had BBQ handy... mmmm - BBQ...
Usual beer festival activities continued, including consumption of many wooden tokens, and a rousing sing along to the band's rendition of 'Livin' on a Prayer', before we boarded the bus to return home. Somehow a chorus of 'Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus' seemed appropriate. Imagine our shock when we were joined from further down the coach by someone chiming in with 'cuz she's yer mammy's mammy!'. It never fails - wherever I go I meet a Scouser and a Glaswegian. I swear we're taking over the world...
