Back to the Roots

When I arrived to Boston 4 months ago, I stayed in a hotel in Allston, a neighbourhood South-West of Cambridge and closer to Boston University. My first morning in this city I ended up having breakfast (blueberry pancakes, of course) in an extremely nice and relaxed coffee house Allston Café, on Brighton Avenue. I was immediately impressed, it was a café that would be a perfect hang-around place for cool characters of a sitcom. Actually, the employees of the place would themselves form a nice casting with their quirky glasses and tight t-shirts covering their skinny bodies (I take this opportunity to mention that the Harvard guys are often way too pumped up, and boy, they like to show it as well!). The music varied from folk to old school rap and the customers were unpretentious punks or some sort of artists. I was almost intimidated, afraid they might recognise that I belong to the Harvard crowd, rather than to this, it seemed to me, tight-knit community of free souls.

On Thursday, I decided that before leaving Boston I still need to have those blueberry pancakes. I put on my Converse shoes (to hide my “across the river” look) and took the bus (none of my three bus tickets worked so I finally got a free ride) pass the Harvard Business School and over one highway. I suddenly realised what I had been missing in Cambridge: this kind of crowd of different, bohemian (but still not bobo as they could be in Europe), somehow rougher and more interesting people who wouldn’t compare Harvard’s professors to those in Yale or Princeton, oh, they didn’t look like they were very much interested in what was happening in the latest sociology or anthropology research. This was somehow more real, not an academic bubble, a bit like some cool café in Kreutzberg in Berlin or “darker” side of Santo Spirito in Florence. Those people with so many tattoos and hair colours that first you seem like an outlier but once you have a chance to talk with them, they turn out to be friendly and interested in you (and not in your research).

I had my wonderful blueberry pancakes with some maple syrup. In the next table, there was a group of four guys. I recognised one of them, I had seen him there drawing the first time I went to the café. This time, I ended up having a conversation with him. He was an artist, some of the painting on the walls and in the toilet were his works. He liked drawing monsters (he actually made his living drawing monsters!) and he gave me one of his drawings with recommendations of some comic books that I should try out. I told him I was going to the Museum of Fine Arts and that I was going to leave on Monday (just before some of his arts exhibitions would open in Boston). He wanted me to indulge in my creativeness and proposed me a drawing date in the café during the weekend. It was basically his second home or his office. It was a great idea but I was too sad to call him to confirm a date. Of course, I meet somebody different just before I’m returning back to Europe. I didn’t want to regret of not living in the funnier side of the river where I could have met some interesting personalities who would have been shaped by something else than Ivy League elite schools. Instead of our drawing date, I went to buy a Harvard t-shirt today.

By the way, after a 1,5 hours of walking I finally found Museum of Fine Arts, it was great! And the last sight on my to do –list for Boston, I'm ready to return to Europe.