The Sweatshop of Love Blog

Friday afternoon PT and I jumped on the Fung Wah Bus for Boston to visit our friends Lucas and Laura who recently moved to the area from Portland, OR.

It was a totally smooth trip. We heard about this bus catching on fire and being a real nightmare, but for $15 one way we decided to take the risk and it worked out swimmingly!

Little did we know what was coming.

But before things got hairy we made the short drive in to Boston from Framingham to explore on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

Boston is a very beautiful city. It’s full of parks and old buildings and cobble stone streets.

And old cemeteries full of cool old dudes like Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Ben Franklin’s ‘rents.

We walked the Freedom Trail and it made me wish that everywhere I wanted to go was marked with a red line.

It still didn’t stop us from needing Lucas’s GPS phone and two maps.

We got cannoli at Mike’s Pastry because that is what you do when you are in Boston. I was never into cannoli because I had no idea how good it could be. It was always soggy dough wrapped around cream cheese. This amaretto cannoli was a revelation. It was easily one of the best things I’ve ever eaten and I can’t wait to go back for more.

Another revelation? Candlepin bowling! It’s bowling, but with thin pins and smaller balls, and you get three rolls to knock down all the pins.

I loved it! It’s taking everything I don’t like about bowling out. Finding a ball I can actually throw? No need! All the balls are like bocce ball size and much lighter. Need an extra throw to try to get all the pins down? Take it! Pin stuck in the gutter? Awesome! Hit it and it will knock down more standing pins!

Don’t we look happy? Candlepin bowling on a rainy day. Getting ready to get back on that Fung Wah to New York without a care in the world.

In fact, we made it to South Station early so we jumped on an early bus, the 3:30, thinking we’d make it back by 7:30.

Oh were we wrong.

It was pouring rain our entire way out of Massachusetts and into Connecticut so we were already delayed about an hour when our bus driver pulled into a park and ride because the bus couldn’t get over 30 mph.

We sat. It rained. The bus driver was making calls, trying to get another bus out and a mechanic, but we were smack dab between Boston and NYC. We were thinking worst case scenario they send another bus for us, which will take two hours to get to us, and we are still two hours away from New York.

After half an hour or so the bus driver drove us a few miles down the highway, going 30 miles an hour, to Burger King.

Where PT and I split a ‘Chicken Fry Dinner’. I had no idea chicken fries existed. This was the first time I had been in a Burger King since I was in middle school, but that handy ‘I eat chicken sometimes’ vegetarian rule sure came in handy because there was no way I could eat anything else on that menu, even with my loose rules.

We drank our very large soda and played cards for an hour or so before venturing out to check the bus status.

The mechanic was there and working on it = Good!

Fung Wah was not sending another bus = Bad.

If the mechanic couldn’t get that bus running then we were suck 30 miles outside of New Haven CT. Luckily, the bus got running soon and we were back on the road after about a 3 hour delay. But what if he couldn’t? Fung Wah didn’t give a shit that we were stranded and we would have been on our own, leaving us to cab to New Haven and take the 2+ hour commuter train into Manhattan. How is that a way to run a business?

It was still raining as we pulled into NYC and we had to drive through flooded portions of the highway to get back to Chinatown, but we made it. A good 8 hours after we left Boston.

Despite all of that Fung Wah drama we had the best time in Boston. So much so that it was really hard to come back to this this noisy, dirty city where I have no friends, in a tiny garage apartment with no food in it on a noisy street. Leaving for the weekend made me wish I wasn’t coming back.

And so, 19 days after arriving, I can safely say that while NYC is beautiful and fun and exciting and lively, I do not want to live here, and I do not want to be here any longer.

So it’s a good thing we are heading to Minnesota on Sunday!