Day 92: Chinatown

This evening's activities, a would-be dinner party at a former classmate's house, were a real throw-back to the first year of grad school. Back in the day, we used to do "family dinner" nearly every Thursday night.  We'd traipse over to Sidney-Pacific, the graduate dorms where many of our classmates lived at the time, around 7 or 8 pm, each of us bringing something to contribute.  There were of course a couple of slackers who couldn't really cook and either showed up at the last minute or disappeared before clean-up, but in general everyone contribute at least a few beers.  I was usually prep cook and a cleaner, mostly because I was very intimidated by all of the budding chefs in our class (full of foodies).

These days, I still cook very little, but in my soon-to-be-middle-age (well close enough, anyway), I have dabbled a bit more than I had at the ripe age of 22.  I like to keep it simple, so I brought things to make corn bread and prepared it in the oven.  Pretty easy and somehow turned out great.

The host of the party had decided to have us over because he is moving out soon and wanted to make use of the lovely apartment (and kitchen!) he currently has use of near South Station in Boston.  Although in the end, his own dish was perfectly lovely, and several other people made various dishes that were also lovely, we started to panic of hunger when there were five people at a time in the kitchen making side dishes, so C. and I took a side trip down the street to Chinatown, where it is possible to purchase pretty much the most delicious dumplings known to the Bostonian man. Or woman. Or, mostly, grad student.  More difficult to find coffee in the area at 8pm, but that can also be done at Chinatown's McDonald's. [Note to everyone: if you order iced coffee at a McDonald's, TELL THEM YOU WANT IT BLACK -- unless you want it to be more like a melted milkshake.  But even creamed-and-sugared coffee is better than no coffee at all.]

Day 40: 80 Photos in Boston -- Part 1.

Phase 1: Get there.

Banditos misterifotos. Quick explanation: Banditos Misteriosos are a group in Boston that host free, Boston-tastic events that often involve roaming around the city exploring or hosting a fun activity in a public space.  Today was my first banditos experience, and the theme was a Boston photo-based scavenger hunt.  I had very little idea what to expect.  There were five of us, with our first initials being M (that’s me), J, M, L, and S. JLS are first-years at MIT, and M is a friend I know from choir. This is how we eventually formed our team name, “Ma-jamel-toes”. I know. So sue us.

After a quite epic-in-nature night out at Howl at the Moon, somehow I wound up with an uncharged phone and a ability to sleep easily until 10:30am – the time when we were all supposed to meet outside my apartment (except from M., who was meeting us there). L&S had rallied and woken up J, and then they woke up my roommate, who woke me up. After a 3-minute shower and some hobbling around to find a scavenger-hunt-worthy outfit, I was out the door and we were on our way. M was there early (read: on time) and already had our list of clues: 80 items!

Phase 2: Initial photo-taking frenzy near the Public Garden / Boston common.

We met Meg at the entrance to the Public Garden, and immediately began snapping the camera at anything we could find that vaguely resembled some of the clues on the list.  From my estimation, we snapped about 9 images immediately in or very near the Common:

#61: Public Toilet. Amusing how this was our first hit!  By the end of the day, this row of portable toilets near the park had disappeared...

#8: A person that looks like their pet.  Not our finest effort, but we did see many adorable pups in the park at 11am and one of them had delightfully curly hair – only slightly more delightfully curly than his owner.

#14: This red line carries thousands, but never actually moves.  Now, I know I’ve heard this line before – and of course, it was referring to the red line that connects much of historic Boston on the Freedom Trail, which begins (I think?) quite near the common / near the State House.  I like our particular rendition of it, which is why it also serves as the head picture to this post J.

#15: Period costume tour guide using modern technology.  Perhaps it is cheating to stage events, but we found a Sam Adams-esque man nearly immediately (I think he may even have been an actual tour guide) and handed him a cell phone.  As I said, this part of the journey was a blitz.

#44: A squirrel and a pigeon.  Unfortunately, my camera (which has a non-functional screen, though it does have a viewfinder!) was on a quite low resolution setting.  Great for saving space on my SD card; bad for capturing tiny animals in a wide shot of Boston Common. But I promise you, they are both there.

#39: Playing on a playground. J was, of course, the first to high-tail it to the playground near the Duck Pond in the Common (any time there is a playground around that kid is down to party).  Weird thing was there were no kids on it, at all – at this point it was nearing 11:30a.  When we were back in the Common around 6p, a gaggle of little goslings (I mean children) were out and about.

#45: Wearing a plant.  This one happened without my even realizing at first – I thought S was just wearing a plant for the hell of it.

#46: In or on water. So many opportunities for this today – but L valiantly strolled past the sign proclaiming there was to be no going in.

#69: Impersonating famous movies outside of a movie theater.  Unfortunately we only impersonated one – J and I did Rose and Jack at the helm of the Titanic. Of course.

Phase 3: The not-so-little building.

We realized that an epic day of traipsing about would probably require some cash, so we headed to the Little Building at Emerson College.

#23: An oxymoron. As it turns out, the Little Building is not so little.  Kind of an oxymoron.  More ironic.  Unlike nearly everything Alanis mentions.

#25: Arm wrestling with a stranger. The security guards at the Little Building seemed to me to be slightly suspicious of our exuberance at retrieving money from an ATM.  So to put them at ease, we decided we probably better ask them to help us with our tasks, that way they’d know we were 2legit2quit. By arm wrestling one of them.

Phase 4: The Tam.

The Tam is really a destination in and of itself, anyhow, so it was quite excellent that we found a way to seamlessly worked it into our adventure. I was still not quite ready to daydrink, so I indulged in some orange juice.

#9: An arcade game! Bleep! Bloop! Bloop!. We captured both Big Buck Hunter and Pac Man, but the latter beat out the former.

#57: Most Bostonian image. It has the Patriots. And some old Bostonian dudes. It has a sign that says “Cash only”. It’s at the Tam. It’s pretty damn Bostonian.

Phase 5: Random walk.

This bit of the journey was definitely not at all consolidated by grid cells in my hippocampus. But it was the happiest-go-luckiest random walk in awhile, and the first of many that day.

#20: A sea monster!.  This little was, at first, our best shot at Codzilla (and honestly I think he might be better than the original).  M claims it was clearly a mistranslation. I claim it’s really just Codzilla.

#51: A photo of your camera, no mirrors allowed!. We had the best time at this Chinese supermarket. Trying on scarves was part of it – the picture-of-my-camera part was nearly inadvertent. L & I ended up buying a scarf, too J.

#74: อยากเต้นรำไหม . Most people would give up at this clue. M went: “Oh, that’s Thai. Let’s just go ask someone who reads Thai what it means.” Effing brilliant. Apparently it meant, “Would you like to dance?”

#1: Give a fellow team member a makeover. At first we had walked to the Boston Opera House to find a picture of a long kickline (presumably from A Chorus Line or something), to no avail.  However, we passed a little shop called So Good on the way, so we were all set for giving S a makeover!

#64: It is most often the casement, that names are determined by placement, when push comes to shove, there’s nothing above, then you can no longer call it a basement.  Answer: Filene’s!.

#66d: Photos of your team on all 5 MBTA lines – the Silver Line.  Happily for us we were able to nearly walk on to the Silver Line without breaking stride – oh-so-elusive, it is!

#66a: Photos of your team on all 5 MBTA lines – the Red Line. Of course, it is the line most of us take the most often, and also the line we took in to the scavenger hunt this morning. However, we were not aware at the time that we should simply photograph everything that happened to us! So L and S ventured out to grab a picture of a couple of lines leaving from Park St. while we all walked on foot to South Station.

Phase 6: The waterfront.

It was a bit of a trek to the waterfront, so some of our team members split up to start the “T” journey (one of the clues involved a team member being photographed on each of the 5 lines of the T). It was honestly the only reason we ever split up, which was great.

#24: Using a photobooth.  One shock of the day was that there actually do exist payphones in the city of Boston.  We saw perhaps no actual booths, but this seemed pretty darn close.

#41: The Little Dig. Apparently there is actually (in the French sense, too) a project going on called “The Little Dig” – named as the little sister of “The Big Dig”.  It’s unclear whether this photo actually captures that dig, but either way, it’s definitely a smaller one than The Big Dig (the preceding clue).

#77: The “lobster tours” boat.  After looking at the pictures that other teams posted, it was clear that it was hard to capture a shot of the real lobster tours boat.  We did in fact make it to the correct dock, but in going through the picture later, I couldn’t find it, so subbed this pic, which M took of boats which clearly looked as though they should be hunting for lobsters.

#18: Getting chased by a zombie.  The misteriosos planners clearly knew what they were doing, because there were zombies all over Boston today. And L definitely got chased by some near South Station.

#60: Best beard. Perhaps the planners also knew there would be some serious contenders out for best beard today, because we almost instantly ran into the one we felt was obviously the best.  He was also quite fond of getting photographed with the lovely L J.

#12: Pinkies out at the Tea Party museum.  Though we didn’t go inside most of the museums we ventured to, we did get some excellent shots of them – and an idea of the astonishing number of quirky museums in Boston!

Phase 7: Some serendipity on the trek back from the waterfront.

#2: Peter Pan burned this down. One of the most serendipitous moments of the day was randomly walking along the water and realizing that tout d’un coup, we were at James Hook and Co. Lobsters. I remarked, seemingly off-the-cuff, that oh, perhaps Peter Pan had burned this down – and remarkably, L knew that the lobster place actually had burned down – and all of our cogs turned at just the right time to include this on our list. (S & L also took the opportunity to scavenge some seafood!)