We kicked off November with visitors. One of my best friends from Kansas was taking a girls trip with her mom and a couple good family friends, and they decided to make Boston their destination. I was thrilled.
They arrived on a Friday afternoon, and Ian and I met them for dinner at Zaftigs—they made a trip rule that (aside from Starbucks) they couldn't eat anything they could get back home. Since Jewish food is hard to come by in Kansas and Wisconsin, it fit the bill. For the full experience, we started with the appetizer combo plate (cheese blintz + potato pancake + potato knish + noodle Kugel), before moving on to other carb-laden entrees. They loved it, and we had fun catching up with Megan and Sharon, and getting to know Brandi and Julie.
The next morning, Megan, Ian, and I enjoyed a late breakfast at Tatte and drove a ZipCar around to take in the fall foliage before meeting up with the rest of the crew, who had a much earlier start and already knocked out a good portion of their must-see list. We enjoyed a seafood brunch at the Chart House (in John Hancock's old counting house) while Sharon, Brandi, and Julie regaled us with their stories of the morning, including a butcher at Haymarket taking them for a tour of his fridge in the back.
We walked off lunch with a stroll to the Seaport District to catch the Harpoon Brewery tour, but they sold the last two tickets to the two people in front of us in line. Thankfully though, our trip was not in vain. We headed up to the retail store to look around, and Ian, Sharon, and Brandi (the beer connoisseurs of the group) even managed to snag a few free samples.
Ian headed to band practice, and we headed back to Sharon, Brandi, and Julie's hotel near the Common to drop off the morning's purchases. Just as we walked through the front doors, a scruffy middle-aged man fell down the last four steps of the lobby stairs, taking a fake plant down with him. Julie, a nurse, flew into action while we asked hotel staff to call 911. While calming him down and keeping him still, Julie discovered he was completely intoxicated. This complicated matters, as we couldn't be sure his intermittent consciousness was due to a possible brain injury or just the alcohol.
As soon as the fire department arrived and we answered their questions, we headed up to the room at last, where we laughed in disbelief about what had just transpired. We wondered if the paramedics took the man's belongings with him in the ambulance. We suspected he was homeless; what if the contents of those two small plastic bags were the only things he owned?
Soon, we were ready to head back out to the North End. As we looked around the room, Megan noticed two crumpled plastic bags tucked underneath the night stand. Brandi had grabbed them assuming they were Julie's. They were not.
We debated on how we could reunite them to their owner, but decided we should find out first if they were worth returning. We cautiously opened the bags: two open but relatively full bottles of Viaka. As Julie poured the bottles down the bathroom sink, we laughed that we probably did the man a favor, getting rid of incriminating evidence.
We also realized that it created the perfect introduction to the story of our afternoon: the time we stole a homeless man's vodka. We reviewed the story details on our extremely well-earned trip to Mike's for cannoli, which we consumed in front of the Paul Revere statue before wandering through more of the North End.
The next day after [REUNION] and brunch, we knocked out the remaining sights on their list: the Make Way for Ducklings statue and Harvard, before a final dinner together at Artu.
Megan & Company, thanks so much for making us your destination. It was so good to see/meet you. Come back soon!