Beantown Day Two

Boston is purty cool y'all. People are nice as hell, and unlike Cincinnati strangers make eye contact with you and the bus drivers help you figure shit out when you are lost. Everywhere we have gone people have gone out of their way to help us figure shit out. You can buy a pass for $15 that you can use to ride all the trains and buses you want for a week. The public transit is awesome. The city is incredibly diverse. We rode the orange line train today with Brazilian, Latino, Italian, African, Asian, and pretty much every other kinda people you could think of. I keep noticing that most of the people we see on the streets seem to be pretty well dressed - shirts and blazers and shit. I am also seeing a lot of college-age kids who all look really trendy and diverse in a middle-class big city way, which reminds me of San Francisco. We are staying in Everett, which is a few minutes outside the city and seems to be a historically Italian neighborhood from the 1880's that is now home to lots of Brazilians and Mexicans. 

At the conference today I listened to some presentations about ethnic and cultural geography. There was a guy from OSU who examined the ethnography of Greek immigrants in Ohio and a guy from Australia who gave a talk on housing segregation in Boston. That was really interesting to me since I am trying to figure out this city. Basically his thesis was that the city is really diverse and that purely economic analysis of Boston housing demographic patterns do not hold up. Asians and hispanics (census terms) disperse fairly evenly over the city wherever they can afford housing. Black folk, in contrast, are congregated in a belt in the South side of the city in predominantly black neighborhoods. Roxbury and a few others. 

Roxbury is where Malcolm X lived with his sister as a teenager and first got into wearing flashy zoot suits and going out to jumping jazz concerts, where he delved into black urban life. I gotta go see that shit. Sometime soon I am going exploring the city and I'm gonna check out that part of town. Downtown Boston seems pretty hip. I wanna see the city's ugly underbelly. I keep looking for that biting racism that Dr. Taylor told me about. The only thing I've encountered so far was some hearsay one of the kids I'm with was spreading about the hostel owners making some fucked up racial comment about Africans. I keep waiting for the hostile glare from black folk that I was told I would find here by my professors, but have not yet experienced such. If anything I think there is less of that on public transit than in 'Nati town. But I need more time on the streets exploring the cultural and urban landscape before I can talk about it definitively.

So that's Boston so far. I am genuinely impressed by how friendly everyone is here. People stop us on the street smiling and ask us where we're from and give us directions. More later. Stay tuned. Same bat time, same bat channel.