If life in the South moves slow as molasses, then the pace in Boston can be likened to a bottle of ketchup. It can take a strenuous amount of shaking, pounding, tapping, and swirling to extract any amount of excitement from the unofficial capital of New England. Blame it on the Puritan origins.

Cade and I spent Memorial Day weekend there for two reasons: 1) We anticipated blaring reggaeton at neighbors' parties and thus, wanted to get out of NYC and 2) Maybe Boston would be cooler when it wasn't so damn cold.

Turns out, Boston is pretty dull, even when people aren't ice skating on the sidewalks. I appreciate the history, but where's the future? Cade has declared the city the official set of 28 Months Later. Those will be some very preppy zombies trolling about.

We kept busy playing Spot The Dunkin' Donuts, turning our noses up at Boston's tourist attractions ("Why pay $14 to see a museum in Boston? We live in NYC and can go for a quarter."), and arguing over where to eat. For Cade, vacations are about experiencing local cuisine. For me, vacations are about shopping, exploring places I read about in "not for tourists" literature, and eating reliable fooods that offer no surprises. I was dismayed when we stopped at a Burger King on the ride to Boston. I'd never eaten there, and couldn't bring myself to order more than the Hamlette, which should have the slogan "more fatter with less fart." It made me want to go the way of Ophelia - pork products that taste like candy are quite discomfiting, methinks. It was even harder for me to sit at a seafood place and watch locals bash lobsters with rocks, and then savagely tear their crustaceous bodies apart, all the while normalizing it in those non-rhotic accents.

Somehow, 99.8% of the pictures taken over the weekend were snapped upon arrival. As dull as Boston can be, Cade and I did get to relax and breathe cleaner air and watch boats float by. We saw an indie film in Brookline and went to a Trader Joe's that didn't have a line winding around the entire store. We looked at John Winthrop's grave and got slightly sunburnt.

And then we got back to New York, and the smell of the baking garbage on the sidewalk made me really miss Bawston...for a few minutes.