Boston is Wicked Cool

Though I hoped maybe I'd get a chance to head up (down? over? what direction is it?) there while I was in New York, I wasn't sure if I'd get a chance to visit Boston while I was here or not. Well, that question was answered this weekend and it was awesome. Or, as I was told is a colloquialism to native Bostonians, it was wicked cool.

For whatever reason, I have long held a certain fascination with Boston. Ever since elementary school the American Revolution and the colonial American time period has always been one of my favorite historical eras, and Boston certainly was at the center of that era. When I was in high school I got a recruitment brochure from Boston College as I was applying to colleges, and had the out of state tuition not been so prohibitively expensive I may have tried to convince my parents to let me go there. All of this was, keep in mind, regardless of the fact that prior to this weekend I had never been anywhere close to Boston, nor did I really know anyone who had.

Friday night we packed five guys into a Chevy Malibu and made the trek to Beantown, and it was a hell of a good time. As soon as we got to the friend's apartment we stayed in that night his girlfriend said something in a tell-tale Boston accent, and we were hooked. Everything was closed by the time we got into town, but we still walked through two of the squares in the Cambridge area just to get a look around town.

Saturday morning we got up and prepared for the most crucial aspect of our mission - the Sam Adams Brewery tour. We got to take the "T", listen to the conductor announce the stop for "Hahvahd Squahe" (Harvard Square) along the way, and arrived in Jamaica Plains without incident or delay. All of the suburban areas and outlying cities and towns around Boston proper reminded me a lot of Ann Arbor, which was very cool. I was expecting a large, industrial building when we headed towards the brewery, but was instead pleased to find a very old looking set of brick buildings that looked exactly like a brewery built in the late 1800s should look. The brewery has actually been in Jim Koch's, founder of Sam Adams Brewery, family since the 1880s, and was only renamed Sam Adams in 1985 when Jim Koch reopened the facility under the new label.

The brewery was very cool - the passion that Jim Koch has and has instilled into his employees is very rare to see in a business and actually seem genuine. The Sam Adams brewery in Boston is where things started off, but is now used primarily as a research and development center. New flavors and new brews are perfected there first, and then sent along to the larger breweries and bottling plants elsewhere in the country. After having been there and seen how much pride they take in their craft, I have definitely developed a new respect for Sam Adams, and will look forward to finding the different seasonal beers that they put out.

After the brewery we ventured out beyond the city into a smaller suburban area where one of our host's friends was having a graduation party for finally finishing his degree that he's been working on part time for so long. I may have, in the past, made disparaging comments about Boston fans and people from Boston, and I realize now that there is a big difference between real Bostonians and wannabe - fair weather - bandwagon Boston fans. Real Bostonians, at least the people we hung out with, were great. They gave one of our guys crap for wearing a Yankees hat, and it's great to see a real rivalry that people can be very passionate about, but not take themselves too seriously. Of course, Detroit is going to leave both the Yankees and the Red Sox behind come October, but I didn't tell them that.

At some point in the afternoon, I started picking up bits and pieces of a Boston accent. Unlike my friends who were trying to analyze and mimic certain words or phrases and deliberately force the accent, I just started saying things without even trying. One of our hosts actually commented on how good my accent was sounding, and I didn't even realize I was doing it. I gotta admit, though, I do like the Boston accent. As much fun as it is to make fun of, once you get going it's hard to stop. What's great is that you can just drop "r"s out of words and replace them with an "h" sound, and your words just flow so much easier. I'm sure I still sounded like a tourist, but it was fun either way.

We actually went down into the city on Sunday, and I gotta say that I like Boston more than New York as a city. Sure, New York has all the fancy stores and sights, but Boston just has so much more character to it. All through Boston Common and the surrounding area was a red line indicating the "freedom trail", marking Paul Revere's ride and other historic sights in Boston. We went along Beacon street and saw the bar that was the inspiration for "Cheers", now obviously turned into a theme restaurant with a gift shop and all that. We also went to one of the cemeteries in town where patriots such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, John Hancock, and the victims of the Boston Massacre were buried, and it was just cool to be there. The history and legacy of Boston is just so much more visible than it is in New York City, and it made me more than a little sad that Detroit is also really lacking in that sort of living character and history. I love Detroit, but I couldn't think of analogous parts of town to the old parts of Boston like Faneuli Hall and Quincy Market. Really, the closest comparison I can think of would be Fort Michilimackinac and Mackinac Island, neither of which are actually in or even close to Detroit.

This spring there is going to be a large conference with a lot of job recruiting for student affairs and housing jobs in particular, and it just so happens the conference will be in Boston. I've still got my $250 award for the case study competition I won, so that's definitely being put towards a return trip to Beantown.