Secrets of Boston | What the casual traveler needs to know!

Secret 1: The Sam Adams Brewery actually looks like that.

Actually, it's miniscule. The front half is a museum and altar to beer, and one corner of the back is specially reserved for tours. All bottling is apparently done in two separate facilities across the country, while the flagship building is entirely devoted to small-batch brewing. It's effectively the beer hall R&D division. There's the three brass kettles you see the bearded guy, Billy, pouring hops into in all the commercials (he is one of two brewmasters there five days a week), then a couple lines of about 8 tanks for fermenting and such. Then there's the tasting bar. The tour is well worth it and you'll even get a little 7oz tasting glass. Your ticket is a different Sam Adams flavor label, and they will shuttle you to a bar called Doyle's, where you can get regional flavors and even keep your Boston Lager glass if you fork over the ticket.

[Bonus: The "shuttle" is a trolly filled with disco balls, bubble machines and blasts "Don't Stop Believing." The driver has a single-minded love of Doyle's that honestly borders on the developmentally delayed.]

Secret 2: There are no pretty people in Boston.

Disappointing, but accurate. That cute guy at the bar? He's from Connecticut. Sexy lady from the club? New Jersey. Jersey. Come on. The joggers are jogging because they really need to. Unsurprisingly, the one exception seems to be Perry Street, which is all hipster eateries, small-businesses, and what looks like college housing. If you hate hipsters, flee immediately. If you love Brooklyn and wish it was cleaner and brownstones were less expensive, move to Perry. Say what you will, hipsters are rarely overweight.

Secret 3: Bars close at 1.


Hit the brewery early and grab that uggo from the bar, because there's nothing left to do but pay $20 at the door of an 18-and-over dinky after-hours place where you can watch teenagers roll on e in a pile on the couch. On the up-side, you might actually wake up early enough for your hotel's continental breakfast.

The hotel T.V. remotes even look like sex toys.

Secret 4: The accents are real.

"Wicked" looks to have gone out of fashion, but it joins the letter R in local vernacular heaven. Try not to snicker, but live it up. "Yaw muthah," however, is evidently alive and well at Fenway, at least, though that may have been a statistical anomaly due in part to experimental base conditions.

Homeless People and Tourists Both Do A Lot of Sitting

Saw one of these in New York City last weekend. Thought it was a little unnecessary, but in a "simple, cold-hearted solution to a human problem" sort of way.

"How can we keep homeless people from sitting on the very convenient seat that is our fire hydrants?"

"Well, how about we slap the bottom half of a bear trap on top?"

"Brilliant. Let's call lunch."

Seemed kind of weird at the time. I mean, one thick coat or a backback solves the problem entirely, but I guess that's what all the door men in orange vests were for. Still, what was so special about this building? Why protect these sprinklers and not, say, the ones across the street or even one building down.

It was the Empire State Building, that was probably it. Had to break my "No Looking Up in New York" rule, but with all the tourists around a native can usually get away with glancing skyward for a second or two.

And yes, I'm aware that not knowing I was wandering past the State Building makes me seem like less of a native. Shut up.

O' Canada or: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, Pt. 5

I would put on a Shatner mask and bang Avril Lavigne like a sea green bartender from outer space. I would mount her like the Canadian police. I would nail her like Jesus on the cross.


Now the end of our tale takes quite a bit of explaining to make any sense at all. Firstly, we were drunk. That would normally do it, but there is something sinister about Montreal which I have not said: eighty-five percent of Canadian bums are punks. Now I don’t mean this to say they are bad people. They probably are, but that’s beside the point. Fifteen percent of Canadian bums are homeless beggars, who–according to one who followed us for several blocks inquiring as to the financial situations of New York City beggars–are all bi-lingual and earn upwards of $200 per day squeegeeing car windows. These people are amazing.

The other eighty-five percent are literally punks. They have stepped out of 1985 and into the streets of Montreal. They are garbed in military surplus and black leather, and the most popular accessory is the steel chain. They have large boots and spikes, and ugly girlfriends and unnaturally colored hair. Some kids lived together on the street with their dog. We gave a couple bucks to another kid outside a bar at two in the afternoon because his beggar’s request was, “Hey, can I get two bucks for beer?” He was honest. True punks are crazy, but they’re also brutally honest. If you’ve never seen the movie SLC Punk, watch it, and extrapolate that into Montreal.

Now these people remain on the streets after dark, as they live there. We, on the other hand, were drunken, foreign buffoons, appointing the least drunk of us the responsibility of deciding whether or not there were cars on the road we were about to walk into. The first thing I noticed was a group of teenaged punks huddled outside a closed Mega-Plex with their several canine companions, while one member of their groups was attempting to underhand a shrub-sized Christmas tree up onto the cinema’s lighted sign. Remember, this was late May.

About a block and a half later, Jay, the most punkish and most outrageously violent of our group was stumbling between my stumblings and Mike’s stumblings, and barring his System of a Down t-shirt, generally looking not very punkish or violentish. It was at this time that we passed a small group of punk-bums on the street. They walked between us, and in passing one threw up his leg back and sideways, kicking Jay’s leg and missing his crotch by about two inches. With a steel-toed boot.

Jay apologized, citing that he did not wish to start anything and that he was just drunk.

About three seconds later he rescinded this when he realized that he’d just been kicked by a lousy bum.

We spent a few minutes trying to keep Jay calm and explain that there were three distinct groups of punker-bums eyeing us at that moment, and that meant about fifteen people who would not be very happy with a trio of rabble-rousing tourists. The only thing that finally placate him was our friend Mike replying, "Jay, no, it's fine. He's a bum. He doesn't have a home."

Jay calmed down, laughed, and then proceeded to mock the bum, shouting, "Yeah! That's right. You're a bum! You don't have a house! I'm gonna go sleep in a nice warm hotel bed! You don't have a home!"

About half a block later Jay fell off his high road and punch a stucco wall erected in front of a renovated bodega. Two minutes later he asked us why his hand hurt and added, “Oh, shit! Why am I bleeding? Haha.”

He asked this all again three minutes after that.

And fifteen minutes later back at the hotel when we wrapped his hand in a washcloth from the bathroom dipped in the cooler’s ice water.

He asked again as we went to sleep, and every time we had to tell him, “Jay, you got kicked by a bum.”


This is an apt metaphor for how tourism works. It’s one thing to gripe about the incompetent tech support over in New Delhi, but imagine how this attitude changes when you are walking the streets of New Delhi late at night and your drunken frat buddy decides to go cow-tipping. This is why tourism will always be a novelty: People like cultural diversity, but they never want to feel out of their own element. Tourist centers spring up to offer all the comforts of Home in the middle of Somewhere Else. Businesses start catering to foreigners and not the indigenous peoples, and, ultimately, you get a whole punch of very angry locals who could quite easily teach French in American public schools, but are completely willing to live on the street for nothing if it means they can kick tourists unless they’re handed two bucks for beer.