I’m an asshole. I freely admit it, and confirmed all suspicions on my flight to Boston this week.

It’s my firmly-held belief that God made pigs for one reason: to provide ribcages for carnivores like me. Slowly cooked in a sauce whose recipe is known only to redneck southerners, the ribcage of a pig becomes something heavenly. Vegetarians be damned - slow-cooked ribs is the food of the gods.

I prepared a rack of said ribs on Sunday evening for the expressed purpose of nourishing myself on my flight to Boston.Long story short: when the obligatory bag of peanut (I think there was only one) and bottle containing three millilitres of water was provided for “in-flight service”, I whipped my Ziploc container full of pig ribcage out and shamelessly engorged myself.

The looks I received from the other passengers suggested my bloodied corpse would be carried off the plane. I’m pretty sure the representative from Homeland Security would have led the charge.

But enough about pig ribs, flights and my general assholishness. I’m in Beantown.

My flight landed on-schedule (a first in the history of aviation), leaving me to the scariest taxicab ride in the history of mankind. Taxis in the Middle East drive calmer than Boston cab drivers; I know, since I’ve experienced both. When the cab driver realized he was at the wrong end of the one-way road I was staying on, he thought nothing of putting the cab in reverse and driving at least a half-mile to my destination.

Yes, you read right: backwards.  The wrong way on a single-lane one-way road.

This may be the closest my life insurance policy has ever come to fruition.

I was staying with people I had never met, in an apartment I had never been to, thanks to CouchSurfing. There’s a moment of hesitation when you knock on the door for the first time, but I was delighted to see that Stephanie and Natalie weren’t axe murderesses, freaks or otherwise deficient of chromosomes. In fact, they proved to be thoughtful, intelligent, well-traveled professionals with the aridly-dry sense of humor I miss so much in the South.

We settled in for the night with warm glasses of red, sharing anecdotes about our travels and various couch experiences before preparing my air mattress for the night’s slumber.  And a good night it was - reveling in the notion that I was in another city, meeting new people, and not doing the usual dull business trip.

A little known fact in American history is that Paul Revere installed home furnaces in his spare time … and I’m pretty sure he installed the furnace in this particular apartment shortly before his infamous ride. It displayed the persnicketyness one would expect from a furnace that dates back to the Roman Empire, and reminded me of life back in a wood-heated farmhouse in Central Ontario when we woke up to a rather brisk 54 degrees.

It turns out that Revere also installed hot water heaters … more on that in tomorrow’s update!

1 comment
Posted in Blog
Written on Thu, 14 February 2008 at 6:27 pm
Tags: Boston, couchsurfing, travel
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