Boston Travel Guide, Part I

Boston is a great city, full of history and spunk. It was in Boston that it first realized, though I had heard others speak of it for years, that there truly is a difference between the northern part and the southern part of the USA. I do not mean to say that one is better than the other; they are just different. To overexaggerate it a bit, people are overly nice to your face in the south; people pretty much give it to you straight in the north.

We experienced that while on a sidestreet in the North End, Boston's Italian community. We were looking for a specific pizza restaurant, which I must highly, highly, highly recommend. I'm not sure if it's possible to say something is the best. But if it's possible to classify pizza as the best I have ever had, this would be it, Pizzeria Regina:

Darn good pizza.

Anyway, back to my story. While trying to find Pizzeria Regina, we were walking down a sidestreet, off of one of the main drags in the North End, Hanover Street. We realized that we were clearly not headed in the direction that we wanted to be going, so we decided to ask for help. A foreman of a construction crew was the first person we saw. We hesitated to ask for his help because he was in the middle of cussing one of his crew members up and down. But we decided to go ahead and ask for help. It was amazing. He finished his profanity-laced stream, looked at us, asked if we needed help, provided help in a very friendly, warm fashion, then went right back to giving it to his guy. Very refreshing.

The lesson learned is one that we already knew and one that we continue to learn every time we travel. The main roads of a location and the main sights of a town can be very rich in flavoring your experience there. For instance, you simply do not want to miss things like Harvard, Fenway Park, and a cannoli at Mike's Pastry Shop. But what really makes your trip worthwhile and memorable is the places that are not highly touted in travel books, things that you never expected to experiences because these sorts of things get you in touch with local people, people living their day-to-day lives in ways that you do when you're at home. Getting off the beaten path, perhaps even getting lost, helps you connect with the true heartbeat of a place. When you do that, you come across the most amazing things, memories like this on a seemingly remote part of Beacon Street: