Boston (Day 27): Talking Shop

After a solid sleep, we spent the late morning walking around the western edge of Boston Common, near our hotel.

 

We were due to meet Y, yet another friend of ours from USP who’d been in J’s year. In addition to this relation, Y had also been at Carleton before me, and we were also going to meet A, a friend of Y’s who’d also been at Carleton. We managed to meet somewhere around the Common, and headed west for lunch and coffee. I remember getting started almost immediately on a conversation about philosophy (and our old professors) with Y on the walk there.

Lunch was at the Cheesecake Factory, and therefore huge.

After lunch we took a walk to Pavement for coffee, which turned out to be very good.

The coffee conversation continued to be quite involved and at some point we were discussing that snark and smarm article which I’ve probably mentioned a couple of times here by now.

It was nearly evening when we left the coffee shop. After saying our goodbyes, T and I continued our walk around Boston, this time heading north-east towards the harbour.

It was soon dark (the days not being very long in winter), so we ended up stopping for dinner at what turned out to be a bar-restaurant done up in facsimile of Chinese-ness. There was a sports game on at the bar area, which was reasonably busy; but aside from the staff, Tim and I were probably the only Chinese people there. That the sketchy simulation of Chinese-ness seemed to be at least somewhat successful (judging from at least the size of the place and the ample staffing on a not-very-busy foggy winter night) was a bit mysterious to us. More immediately inexplicable was the business at the bar, since nothing on the drinks list bore ordering (at least to me).

Following dinner, therefore, we were obliged to look for another local watering-hole. We ended up at another sports bar somewhere across town with a much better selection for a few more hours of catching up.

While we’d not planned more for the night beyond dinner, on the walk back from the pub neither of us felt much like bed. We saw quite a bit more of the city on the way back, but I remember stopping to watch this light show going on near Faneuil Hall.

On the way back we passed by a movie theatre, so we ended up watching a late-night screening of American Hustle (incidentally my second Christian Bale movie this winter break). I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I think some of that at least had to do with our feeling as though we’d been talking about the whole world (in truth, the narrowly delimited but thoroughly entangled social world we’d recently been in the thick of) over the past couple of days; for me, at least, there was the feeling of working something over that I’d not quite gotten out of my system, and it was good to see a different complicated world on-screen in dramatic, melodramatic, and meta-dramatic color.