By Gal Tziperman Lotan, News Staff
‘
New to the city? You could follow the pack by taking a few photos in front of the best-known Boston landmarks and locking yourself in a dorm for the rest of your college tenure. New students with a sense of adventure, however, may want to visit a few sites that are less traditional but far more fascinating.
‘
Walking the Freedom Trail
Follow the painted red line on the sidewalk ‘- and the tourists wearing too much Red Sox and Harvard swag ‘- to some of the Revolutionary War’s most important sites. The 2.5-mile path starts in the Boston Common ‘ information center near the Park Street Red and Green Line T stop and ends at the USS Constitution, a floating museum in Charlestown. On the way visitors pass the Old State House (206 Washington St.; $7 for adults, $6 for students) where they can see tea that survived the Boston Tea Party. The walk is a classic Boston attraction and well worth the time – unless you have no patience for slow-walking tourists and their cameras.
‘ The Boston Freedom Trail: ‘ free, no set hours. For more information, go to thefreedomtrail.org.
Instead: ‘ Samuel Adams and Paul Revere are important Boston figures, but by no means the only ones. In 40 stops across the city, the Irish Heritage Trail tells the stories of influential Irish immigrants and their descendants, from potato famine victims who relocated to Boston to the Kennedys. Don’t want to venture too far from campus? Mytown tours go through the South End, Fenway and Lower Roxbury ‘- the three neighborhoods Northeastern borders ‘- and are led by a group of bright and enthusiastic Boston teenagers. Jews and appreciators of the chosen peoples’ cuisine can go to Brookline, a town immediately west of Boston, and take an Ahla Brookline Food Tour of Jewish and Russian food. The tour is a hefty $44, but oy, wouldn’t your mother be glad you’re eating all that matzo ball soup?
The Irish Heritage Trail: ‘ free, no set hours. For more information, go to irishheritagetrail.com.
Mytown tours: ‘ sliding scale of $3 to $15 a person. For dates and times, go to mytowninc.org.
Ahla Brookline Food Tour: ‘ $44. For dates and times, go to brooklinetour.com.
‘
The Museum of Fine Arts
It’s a five-minute walk down Huntington Avenue and Northeastern students get in for free. Though the permanent collection includes standard museum fare ‘- ancient mosaics, greek sculptures and Italian renaissance painters ‘- visitors will also find Seeing Songs, where visual artists taped themselves singing contemporary songs. The exhibition will run through Feb. 21, 2010, and after it leaves, you may as well check out some other off-kilter museums.
The Museum of Fine Arts: ‘ 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. $17 for adults, free with NU ID For more information, go to mfa.org.
Instead: Try the Museum of Bad Art for some laughably fantastic work. Admission is free with a ticket to the Somerville Theater, located right above the gallery, but art like ‘The Haircut’ by M. Jackson and J. Reilly, which is a hairdresser’s chair with scissors hanging above it, is priceless. For more refined pallets, The Harvard Museum of Natural History has a collection of tiny flowers made entirely out of glass botany students used in the 19th century, before Harvard had fancy computer models. The museum also includes fossils, shiny minerals and a climate change exhibit.
The Museum of Bad Art: ‘ 5 Davis Square, Somerville. $5 to $8, depending on the movie. For more information, go to museumofbadart.org.
Harvard Museum of Natural History: ‘ 26 Oxford St., Cambridge. $9 for adults, $7 for non-Harvard students, free for anyone with a Harvard ID. For more information, go to www.hmnh.harvard.edu.
‘
