Boston, Day 1: The World's Ugliest Building

La Vita Nuova is a lesser-known work by Dante.  It means "The New Life" and it'sa very romantic, heatfelt mess of sonnets and prose.  I feel like I'm living in it right now.  In the past week I've sold my house, moved to Ithaca, and started a new job at Cornell.  Everything feels new. 

And now I'm in Boston doing training for Oracle SOA Server ... I thought this would be all-consuming but our class is small and the instructor is very funny, informative, and kind enough to let us roam free on our lunch hour.  So I'm finding more free time than I thought I'd have.

Rather than eat lunch, I started walking around the Freedom Trail and ended up in Old South Meeting Hall.  This is where the rabble rousers discussed the Boston Tea Party before carrying it out.  The Meeting Hall has a long history of debating free speech and the merits of same.  Evidently in the 30's there was an outcry against Margaret Sanger, the champion of birth control and founder of Planned Parenthood, and a lot of people were pissed off that she was issued a gag at the city limits of Boston and was not allowed to speak.  A debate about "Boston-banning" occurred here as well.  I guess that sounds like Boston has more a history of censorship than anything ... but really, whereas other cities quietly banned that stuff or were just not interested, Bostonites dragged all their dirty laundry out in the open.

I found a book in the gift shop on "Weird Boston", and they mentioned the World's Ugliest Building, an honor bestowed upon the new Boston City Hall, built in the 60's.  Which means I had to go see it!  And man is it ugly.  Butt-ugly.  It's from the "Look How Hip I Am" school of architecture, trying hard not to be boxy buy failing miserably.  If that weren't all, it doesn't fit in with the surrounding architecture at all.  Yuck!

But if one can balance out the ugliness of a building withe the beauty of dinner, I did it!  I just had the best fish ever at Atlantic Fish Company.  They are pretty obsessive about the fish freshness there, and their menu changes daily to reflect it.  Today their catch was Red Snapper grilled and served weith butter-garlic sauce, and MAN!  It snapped my head back in amazement!  Most fish is flaky and kind of reminds you of an onion whose layers peel away with a very thin slimy film in the middle. This fish was more like beef or chicken - stringy and dense.  It was kind of like the duck we had in France - it barely resembled the classic American version.  It wasn't strongly fishy, yet it didn't taste "mild" - e.g. like water.  It was just the right amount of seafood.

On the side were mashed potatoes with shrimp and calamata olives.  A bed of perfectly-grilled asparagus graced the top.  A glass of Poilly Fume was the perfect pairing - tasting as strong as Pineapple juice on the first sip, then a pleasant aftertaste like dish soap (which sounds bad, but it's more like what smells good about dish soap, and nothing else).  For dessert - fruit crisp made with the fruit of the day, fresh from the oven and worked over with a blowtorch like creme brulee.  They bring it to your table and top it with a scoop of ice cream at the last possible moment so you don't get any meltage.

I ended up in the Whiskey Bar of the Omni hotel, reading an essay on the pianist Fred Hersch and nursing a single malt Islay Scotch - rich and peaty and smoky like a good one should be.  It was good, but was exemplrary were the nuts.  They toast them in the oven (and good ones only - macadamias, cashews, almonds) before serving them in a small bowl to you.

If you've ever put your fingers in a bowl of hot nuts, you know what a joy it is.  Eee gads.  Did I write that?  Oh well.  Not every sentence needs to be perfect in La Vita Nuova.