Legal MBAyhem's Guide to [Eating] in Charlottesville - Part I

[Note: I started writing this post, oh, something like six weeks ago.  Clearly, it has been sitting - unfinished -  in my blog "drafts" box for a long time.  Therefore, I've decided to publish what I have already now, and at some point when I have free time (ha!), I will post the remainder.]

In Part II of my Guide to Cville series (see Part I, on getting settled pre-school, here), I'd like to share some of my personal eating/dining/enjoying the glorious local bounty of the Blue Ridge favorites.  I've done this "Best of" style, with some runners-up.  Obviously, these are just my thoughts and opinions, and I've generally focused on foods/items that are either very convenient to North Grounds or well within the student budget.  So, I haven't focused a lot of truly "fine dining," but I think these are worth checking out!

I've broken this list down into categories that make sense to me but that may not make sense to others.  It's my blog, so I guess that's what you get...  :-)

Best Quick Lunch Near North Grounds: Bellair Market
When I was planning to move to Cville, my boss in the legal dept. at The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named, a UVa Law alumna, told me two key things about dining in Charlottesville: First, a Gusburger tastes delicious after a night on the Corner, and second, the best sandwiches in town are available at a gas station on Ivy Road.  I have yet to indulge in a gusburger (fried egg+hamburger=heart attack), and I was very, very skeptical of gas station fare (though I do love me some Wawa).  However, she was right - the sandwiches at Bellair Market in the Exxon on Ivy Road are pretty darn tasty sandwiches. Plus, they are affordable and close to school.  Some of the other Exxons in the area also carry pre-made versions of the sandwiches (e.g., the Exxon at the corner of 29 and Hydraulic, on my way home), and the Exxon at Forest Lakes by Target also makes the sandwiches to order if you ever want to grab one on your way out of town. 
Honorable Mentions: Padow's Hams & Deli in Barracks Road Shopping Center - North Wing (end of Millmont Street), Abbott Center dining room to-go at Darden (can't beat the convenience), and Chipotle in Barracks Road Shopping Center (sometimes you just want a big-a$$ burrito). 

Best Indian Food: Royal Indian
For the record, there are basically three Indian restaurants in town: Royal Indian (by Target, so a little ways up 29), Maharaja (in the Seminole Square Shopping Center on 29 between Hydraulic and Greenbrier), and Milan (on 29 just before Hydraulic).  Charlottesville seems divided on which is best.  I like Maharaja better than Milan, but I've had people tell me I'm crazy.  In fairness, I haven't tried the lunch buffet at either because I have always been underwhelmed by lunch buffets EVERYWHERE.  But take-out from either Maharja and Milan is pretty good.  Royal Indian, however, is worth the drive if you want to sit down.  I went to try it for the first time the other day, and it may even be worth the drive for take-out. 
Honorable Mentions: See above

Best Thai Food: Tara Thai
Consistently tasty food, extensive menu, close to grounds, the ability to have pad see yew and a cocktail at 2 in the afternoon after finishing your first round of b-school exams....what is not to like?  Tara Thai's pad thai is only OK, but I think it's definitely better than that from other local restaurants, and I haven't been disappointed by the rest of the menu. 
Honorable Mentions: Thai 99 II and Pad Thai (I thought their pad thai itself was kind of blah, but others like it)
Stay Away From: Monsoon if you want food that actually tastes like Thai food as opposed to a sloppy concoction of random noodle-y things (you can sit outside, though, and it's just off the Downtown Mall, so decide if you're willing to consume less-than-stellar food at Downtown prices for the location/outside factor)

Best "Splurge" or Off-the-Beaten Path Lunch: Feast!
When I lived in Boston, an $8-9 sandwich was no big deal; now that I'm a student, I can't spend that on a sandwich with any sort of regularity.  However, every now and then, I need to treat myself, and the sandwiches at Feast! are truly scrumptious.  Plus, they feature a lot of locally-grown vegetables and locally-raised meat products.  Feast! is also a great place to buy tasty gourmet treats, local vegetables, local cheeses, etc. (and they would love to get more Darden/UVa law students to come in!).  Courtney of their catering staff is also fabulous and very accommodating.   It's worth the trek down West Main Street every once in a while. 
Honorable Mentions: Cville Coffee (service can be slow, though - but they also host various musical performances in the evening), Revolutionary Soup (locations both on the Corner and off the Downtown Mall)

Best "Splurge" or Off-the-Beaten Path Dinner: Tie between C&O and Tavola
Both C&O and Tavola are a bit pricier (my C&O consumption has been funded by corporate sponsors prior to interviews, and Tavolo was my one nice treat to myself this summer), but they are tasty (and maybe great places to get the parents to take you when they are in town). 
Honorable Mentions: L'Etoile, Mas Tapas

Best Frozen Concoction: Splendora's
I am a gelato snob, thanks to Caffe Gelato in Newark, DE, which I fell in love with when I was, oh, about 11 years old.  Best.  Gelato.  Ever.  Then I went away to college in Providence, where my roommate and I actually put together a business plan for a gelateria on Thayer Street as part of a class assignment (the horrible Roba Dolce actually opened the next year, but it was icky.)  There was some decent gelato in Boston, but nothing to write home about.  Then I encountered Splendora's.  It is super, super, super delicious, and it's REAL gelato, not a masquerading imposter. 
Honorable Mentions: Arch's Frozen Yogurt (those melt-y delicious brownie mix-ins are tasty, tasty morsels of evil) and Sweet Frog (which just opened on the Downtown Mall and is reminiscent of Pinkberry). 

Best Bakery: Albemarle Baking Company
You walk in, and it just smells like a bakery should smell.  Soooooooo good.  I wish they would bottle that smell.  Albemarle Baking Company has wonderful breads, melt-in-your-mouth croissants, assorted danish, and fancy schmancy cakes and tarts.  Plus, it's conveniently located in the Main Street Market (see below).
Honorable Mentions: Hotcakes (great cakes, and some tasty "gourmet" prepared items and sandwiches, as well as breakfast items and a coffee bar) and Chandler's Bakery (up 29 in Albemarle Square - tasty cookies, eclairs, napoleons, etc.)

Best Single Location to Give Yourself a Local Food Coma: Main Street Market
The Main Street Market is the home of Feast!, the Organic Butcher of Cville, Albemarle Baking Co., Orzo, Calvino Cafe and Gearhart's Chocolates.  Go.  You won't regret it (well, your wallet will, but your stomach won't).

The Hotel LegalMBAyhem

Every few months, as I'm writing my rent check, I think to myself, "Hmmmm...I could be saving so much money if I had a roommate!"  Then I realize that a.) I could also be spending a lot more money if I lived in another city/town/hamlet or even elsewhere in Charlottesville and b.) I really do love my apartment.  Particularly the fact that I have both a guest room and a guest bath, which makes hosting whole passels of family and friends from out of town very easy and enjoyable.  The weekend of my second big jam-making fest, (two weekends ago), my parents were in Cville, and this weekend, my friends and college sorority sisters M and T flew in from Boston and NYC, respectively.  For both of them, it was their first trip to the 'ville, so we made sure to pack in a lot of fun.  Luckily, the weather gods decided that Charlottesville has suffered through sufficient 100+ degree weekends, so it was gorgeous on Saturday and in the 70's and lower 80's all weekend. 

M flew into Cville's wee small airport late on Thursday night, so she spent Friday doing some work and chilling in my apartment while I went to the office, and in the afternoon, we drove to Richmond to pick up T from RIC.  M had put in a request for good barbecued southern meat products for dinner, so we stopped at Alamo BBQ before jumping back on the highway.  Very, very tasty pulled pork, and scrumptious jalapeno mac and cheese!  Then, we schlepped back to Cville along one of the most boring and uneventful stretches of highway I have experienced with any sort of regularity.  Naturally, the boring car ride made us hungry again, so we stopped for Arch's frozen yogurt (a Charlottesville institution) before making it home and spending the rest of the evening catching up. 

Saturday was a whirlwind of planned activities.  We got up early to try the breakfast tacos at Beer Run and then drove to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.  They've actually added a new tour that (for an additional fee, of course) lets you do the original house tour and then a "behind the scenes" tour of the second and third floors of the house, including the family rooms and Dome Room.  We wandered around a little bit before and after our schedule tours and then headed down the mountain past TJ's grave.   I've been to Monticello a few times (both with S last August before school started and with the 'rents in April), so I've got a bunch of pictures I haven't posted anywhere else, and I might as well post them here:

Looks like the back of a nickel, huh?

The crowning moment of my photography career, right here, folks.

The hazy view from the mountain

Flowers along the path this spring

More flowers in the garden

View over the terraced gardens, which had tiny little plants in April and a jungle of produce in August

I love daffodils

Tulips

Another shot of the "West Front"

Gorgeous budding trees in April

Yes, I could totally live here

The deer that greeted us on Saturday when we stepped off the shuttle

This is what happens to an artichoke if you don't drown it in butter and eat it first

T was scared of the butterflies...so naturally I needed to take a picture of this vicious creature

After Monticello, we grabbed a late lunch at the historical Michie Tavern (yep, totally touristy, but you've got to try it once) and then spent the afternoon doing wine tastings at Jefferson Vineyards, Blenheim Vineyards (owned by Dave Matthews...no, he wasn't there, and much to our disappointment, none of the bottles magically started playing "Ants Marching" when you took out the cork), and Kluge Estate Winery & Vineyards.  On the way back towards town, we drove by Carter Mountain Orchard, where we picked up some peaches (for me) and some peach cider donuts (for T).  Carter Mountain also happens to have a wine tasting room that offers $2 tastings of Prince Michel  wines, including some made from Carter Mountain fruit, with the proceeds going to charity, so of course we had to try that, too.  Duh.  When we finally made it home, we decided to spend the evening in with a Redbox DVD (which we never watched) and take-out Indian and some more wine, and H and J (local friends) came over to join us for a bit. 

On Sunday, I made breakfast (mmmm....blueberry pancakes...mmmm), then T and I dropped off M at the Cville airport, picked up sandwiches at Bellair Market, and drove to King Family Vineyards hoping to catch one of the Sunday afternoon polo matches (I'd gone with C, K, and H to the Pink Ribbon Polo match in June when it was a million degrees outside - random token photos from that below, last one of us talking to the player courtesy of C.  Note my ability to find an appropriate and color-coordinated polo hat.).  Unfortunately, the match had been cancelled due to rain the night before (and drizzle that morning), but we did a tasting and then sat outside on the patio enjoying our tasty sandwiches and the beautiful views.  Then it was back to RIC to drop off T, and the Hotel MBAyhem cleaning staff had to start doing laundry and re-making beds. 

Rusticating, Part II

As I posted a few weeks ago, this has been a summer full of "rustic" activities: gardening, picking fresh local fruit, visiting the Charlottesville City Market, canning, etc.  Two weekends ago, I decided to try my hand at yet another activity that has me thinking that maybe I was actually raised on a farm and just don't remember: cheese making.  For whatever reason, I suddenly just had a burning desire to make cheese with my own two little hands.  Yes, I know, I am a freak of nature.  So, I did some digging around on the internet and found instructions/recipes for both ricotta cheese and mozzarella that seemed relatively straightforward.

I started with the ricotta cheese, which seemed fairly foolproof, even for a cheese-making novice like me.  Basically, you throw milk (which I buy in glass bottles, 1950's style, from a local dairy that supplies Charlottesville Krogers), vinegar and some yogurt into a pot and heat it until it curdles, then you dump the whole thing into a strainer lined with cheese cloth and about half an hour later, ta-da, you have ricotta cheese! 

Ricotta cheese starting to form curds (in my very poorly lit kitchen)

Ricotta cheese straining in cheesecloth-lined collander

Finished ricotta in a container!

Making ricotta was so easy that I felt motivated to try making mozzarella, which requires some slightly more exotic ingredients and a little bit more time and effort.   You need a good candy thermometer (or something else that reads temps under 100 degrees F well), twice as much milk, rennet, citric acid, and salt.  I have never in my life had to purchase rennet before, but fortunately Rebecca's Natural Foods in the Barracks Road Shopping Center carries rennet, citric acid, and cheesecloth.   There are varying "recipes" on the internet, but basically, you heat the milk to around 88 degrees, add the rennet (dissolved in some water), add the citric acid, heat to around 105 degrees, and then scoop out balls of cheese curds and squeeze the whey from them with your hands.  You then place the balls of cheese into the microwave (this is the faster way...if you are particularly industrious, you can dip them back into the whey until they soften) for a few seconds, remove them, squeeze out the whey, knead, and repeat until the mozzarella reaches the texture you want.  You add salt at the second kneading (I am kind of anti-salt, especially since I'm working for a company focused on hypertension and salt sensitivity this summer, but you can't make mozzarella without salt.  Seriously.).   I think I over-kneaded a bit....probably one too many rounds of kneading, because once I had refrigerated the cheese, it came out more like mozzarella that you could grate and put on a pizza than soft "fresh" mozzarella that you would turn into mozzarella caprese.  But that didn't stop me from making a nice caprese with some local tomatoes (only my cherry and grape tomatoes are ripe) and home-grown basil!

Essential ingredients - vegetable rennet and citric acid

Just getting started....

Some nice preliminary curdling action around 88-90 degrees F

The first ball o' cheese

Mozzarella balls, pre-microwaving and pre-kneading

Finished mozzarella balls, ready to go into the fridge

A nice fresh caprese salad platter!

After my cheesemaking, I decided to make some braided Italian herb bread (I like to pack a lot into one day, OK?), and then I packed up the whole lot to take over to Brianne's, where she was cooking up some very tasty pasta with veggies.  We enjoyed the food and then topped off the evening for a trip to Splendora's for gelato.  Tasty, local/homemade, Italian food - what more can a girl want?

That is a good-looking homemade bread if I say so myself

I took a few days off after The Great Cheesemaking of 2010, and then my parents came into town for the weekend.  On Saturday, we grabbed breakfast at Albemarle Baking Company, picked up sandwiches to go at Bellair Market, hit up three wineries (Barboursville, Prince Michel, and Sweely Estate), and topped off the day with dinner at The Bavarian Chef (totally worth the drive, but don't go on the hottest day of the year - their poor little A/C just couldn't keep up!).  Sunday, we did breakfast at a little place down the street from my apartment and then went peach-picking at Chiles Peach Orchard and blackberry-picking at Hill Top Berry Farm (they also have a winery/mead-ery) before the parents hit the road and left me to my own devices.  Naturally, once they left, the hot water canner came out again and I started canning up a storm.  In two evenings, I made peach salsa, peach pie filling, peach melba jam, blackberries in framboise, blackberry syrup, blackberry apple chutney, blackberries preserved in water (for use in baking recipes later in the year...blackberry cobbler in February?  Yes, please!), and maple walnut syrup (because I could...). 

Mmmmm....tasty canned goods!

This is what my coat closet looks like now...anyone need some canned goods?

And that, in a nutshell, is Rustication, Part II. 

Rusticating

Let me be clear: I am not typically an overly outdoorsy, tree-hugging sort of person (I did hug a tree once, but I went to Brown, so it was basically required before they let you graduate).  When and if I ever own a house, I plan to hire someone to take care of the yard, because yard work really isn't my thing (and my neighbors would end up stoning me because the place would become an eyesore very quickly).  I think the local food movement is great, but I also like to eat raspberries in January.  However, all those disclaimers aside, I have spent much of the last couple months going all "crunchy granola" and becoming domestically inclined in a thoroughly "old school" sort of way.  Maybe it's just the relative abundance of free time that the summer has afforded me, or maybe it's a result of living in the "country" (or maybe it's both...), but I've been rusticating to an extent that has started to frighten even me. 

It started innocently enough, I suppose.  When my parents and sister came down to visit for Easter (yep, I cooked Easter dinner this year), my father brought with him some tiny little mint plantings for me.  Mojitos are one of my favorie summer time drinks, and I maintain that you shouldn't be permitted to live in Virginia if you don't have all the makings of a mint julep on hand at any time, so this seemed like a good idea.  Plus, I already knew that I'd be spending my summer in the Charlottesville area rather than abandoning my apartment for the summer like many of my classmates with exciting jobs in exotic locales, so that meant I'd be around to water plants and all that stuff.  Well, the mint seemed to start me down a slippery slope.  I decided that if I had mint, I might as well have basil (for homemade pesto, another my summer favorites) and other herbs, too.  And while I was making the trip to Lowe's for window boxes and potting mix and seedlings, I might as well buy one of those nifty little upside down tomato growing pot thingamajigs, too, right?  Right.

Three months later, I have realized that there is either some sort of plant equivalent of steroids in the water here, or I actually may have a wee little bit of a green thumb.  Who knew?  The herbs are out of control, I've had to repot the tomatoes because they over-grew their original hanging pots and became slightly suicidal (one of the two pots spontaneously plunged two stories to its almost-demise), and I decided to diversify into peppers, too. 

Yep, I'm basically running a garden/mini-farm off of my little apartment porch.   My tomatoes have been very tasty...

...and I've been trying very hard to be patient while this guy ripens (but I am not naturally a patient person):

I've really been enjoying having fresh herbs for the aforementioned summer cocktails and pesto and other tasty treats, and I also bought an ice cream maker and made fresh homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream (and strawberry frozen yogurt with fresh-picked strawberries).   I brought the tasty frozen products to a BBQ a friend hosted, and they got rave reviews.  Yay!

In addition to my sudden urge to become a gentlewoman farmer (inspired by our man Thomas Jefferson, but minus the whole land-owning part) and purveyor of frozen delights, I developed an almost unhealthy obsession with the ancient art of canning.  By canning, I mean preserving various tasty foods in glass jars, of course!  I don't exactly know what inspired my desire to take up this new hobby, but it *may* have been related to my childhood love of going to pick fresh fruit.  Picking (and eating) locally grown fruit with my own two grubby little hands has always been a summer-time ritual in my family.  Now that I live alone in a climate and location that again permits me to partake in said activity (Rhode Island and Massachusetts were great for apple picking, but not much else), I needed a way to ensure that the fruits of my labors (literally and figuratively) didn't go to waste.  Because really, in my mind it's not worth it to drive out to the middle of nowhere to spend time picking fruit if you're only going to pick what you can eat in the next day or two.  Plus, homemade jams and jellies are both tastier and healthier than the ones you can buy at the store.  And I like to cook and bake, so canning seemed the next logical step in my own personal domestic diva development project. 

So I invested in a boiling water canner ($20 at the local Wal-Mart) and all the little necessary gadgets like jar lifters and lid lifters and canning funnels.  Oh, and the jars (which a friend of mine had to special order in Massachusetts but which are sold in grocery stores and WalMart here in more sizes and shapes than you might imagine).  I purchased so many jars at Wal-Mart that the cashier closest to the door by the housewares section and I were on a first-name basis.  For my first attempt, I chose strawberry jam.  It went so well (and tasted so good), that naturally I had to go cherry picking and make things with the cherries, so I made preserved cherries in almond syrup (delicious spooned over homemade vanilla bean ice cream) and cherry raspberry compote.  And then, because I was feeling pretty good about my mad canning skillz at this point, I made bread and butter pickles.  Yes, I did this all within the first week of owning a canner.  I may or may not be slightly obsessive about new hobbies (and again, I don't have homework, so what's stopping me?)

 

The results of my first week of canning: jam, compote, preserves, and pickles

Week 2 of my new addiction - er, hobby - conveniently coincided with the start of peach season and raspberry season, and Week 3 marked my first trip to the Charlottesville City Market (the big Saturday farmer's market downtown).  During these weeks, my canning repertoire expanded to include dill pickle slices, Oktoberfest beer mustard (no seasonal ingredients involved, but who cares?), golden relish, raspberry jam, chocolate raspberry sauce, peach salsa, berry wine jelly, and blueberry chutney.  Brianne even came over for a canning "lesson" (I use the term very loosely) when I made the chutney. 

From left to right: (front "row") Oktoberfest beer mustard, berry wine jelly, golden relish, blueberry chutney, peach salsa; (back "row") chocolate raspberry sauce, raspberry jam

Once I had made all of these tasty treats, I had to figure out where to store them.  I already keep a fairly well-stocked pantry (no real surprise there), and since most people don't have a root cellar these days (you should store glass jars of fruits and vegetables in cool, dark places so that the light doesn't lead to discoloration), I had to clean out the shelf in my coat closet in order to hold lots and lots of jars.  I also put together a gigantic basket of homemade treats as a gift for Father's Day (my mother hates sugary sweet things like jams and jellies, so she got a jar of bread and butter pickles and Dad got everything else).  Everyone else should be forewarned that I will be gifting canned goods from now and until eternity...

My last domestic rustication effort of the summer (so far) has included making all sorts of side dishes and tasty morsels for barbecues and picnics and whatnot in town.  One of my friends threw a surprise b-day barbecue for his girlfriend, and I offered to make the cake (this same friend once challenged me to a bake-off...after two months of talking smack, he finally forfeited after the aforementioned b-day barbecue).  Since I was feeling particularly ambitious, I actually decided to make a round layer cake AND to hand write the birthday wishes; I usually cop out and make a sheet cake, frost it in the pan, and buy "Happy Birthday" candles.  My focus is taste, not appearance.  But I think that this one looked pretty good (and certainly tasted good - red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting....mmmmmm), if I may say so myself:

I've been taking some time off from rusticating due to travel plans for the last three weekends, and I've been spending several of my evenings doing fun exciting things like organizing my case materials, ironing, and all that other stuff that you can do inside in the air conditioning (it was one of the hottest Junes on record in Charlottesville).  Since I'm in town again this weekend for the first time in a while, and I hear that it's blackberry season, I'm thinking I might need to bust out the canning materials again...

Things I'll miss about Boston (part I of what I'm sure will be many)

I've been so caught up in preparing to move to Virginia and go back to school that I haven't really spent much time thinking about (or appreciating) everything in Boston lately. However, on Thursday, I went to go see the Boston Pops. I assume you've all seen the whole "Pops Goes the Fourth" thing on CBS on 4th of July each year, because really, it's soooo much better than the broadcast from DC (plus it's super cool to go camp out on the Esplanade for the day to see the thing live), but for those of you who are neither patriotic nor orchestral buffs, an overview of the Pops is here. The guest conductor for the performance on Thursday was John Williams (you know, he's the guy who wrote the music for Star Wars, ET, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Superman, Schindler's List, Jaws, the Sunday Night Football theme, the music for the Olympics that NBC always plays, that Air & Simple Gifts song played at the Obama inauguration, etc.). Sorry, I think I may have gotten a little carried away with the links there. But the man is a legend, and I think everyone should appreciate that. Humph. Anywho...the concert was amazing; Williams was conducting the Pops through a Film Night program that featured music from several of the movie scores he's done, so it was music that even folks who don't generally go to the symphony or Pops concerts or anything of that ilk would appreciate. Stanley Donen, former choreographer and musical director at MGM was also a special guest (I didn't know this either, but he's the "King of the Hollywood Musical," i.e., the guy who directed folks like Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain and Fred Astaire in the famous dancing on the ceiling scene in Royal Wedding.) Donen is literally the most adorable, scrappy little old man I have ever seen, and he and Williams and the Pops did this really cool thing in which Donen and Williams would talk about a particular scene in a movie musical, and then they would play a clip from the film on a big screen so the audience could see it, and then as the film clip showed the actors and the dancing, Williams would conduct the orchestra to play the "background music" to the film. It was SO COOL because he was so spot-on in conducting the live music exactly in time with the movie. And I doubt that was an easy feat given the dancing and all that...maybe it sounds easy to read the description, but it was really amazing in person, and you could tell it was meant to be impressive. Even Donen seemed ridiculously impressed. But again, like I said, Williams is a legend.

So, clearly I loved the performance. But I also realized a couple things while I was on the T (Boston public transportation) back home (because naturally, that was an hour-long process to go 3 miles, and it gave me plenty of time to think). First, it was exactly 10 years ago that I visited Boston for the first time, on the annual "8th Grade Boston Trip" that my grade school did every year in May. It was during that trip that I decided I wanted to live in Boston when I grew up. I'm not quite sure why I had that epiphany, but it clearly stands out in my mind. I think I recognized that Boston was a "big" city that didn't feel too big, that seemed "friendly," and that offered a good blend of history and contemporary culture (remember, I grew up in teensy tiny Delaware, I think NYC is too big/busy/dirty/crowded for me, and I have always generally disliked Philadelphia, for a variety of reasons, most related to the attitudes and behaviors of the people who inhabit the area). Whatever the reason, I distinctly remember thinking, "I could live here," and that wasn't a thought that I'd ever had before about a place that wasn't already "home." I've since had that feeling about a couple other places (e.g., Providence, Charlottesville, London), not all of which I've lived in yet, but as a kid, this was a big thing for me. Now, don't go thinking that I set about the rest of my life with a mission to end up in Boston, but when I finished college a semester early and needed to decide what to do with myself while I was still tied to Providence due to my lease and the fact that almost all of my friends were still in school, Boston seemed a logical place to start looking for work. So, when I found a sweet job in Boston, to which I could easily commute from Providence until graduation and my lease ran out, that's where I ended up. Since then, I've really enjoyed Boston, and it's nice (for lack of a better word right now) to feel that I've come full-circle...even down to the John Williams thing. See, as part of the 8th Grade Boston Trip, we went to go see the Boston Pops, and, unbeknownst to those of us who were expecting the "standard" Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, John Williams was scheduled to guest conduct that evening, too (even better, the guest artist was Itzhak Perlman. So cool.). Funny how the world works sometimes, ain't it?

The second thing I realized on my long T ride was that I am really going to miss all of the cultural stuff that has been so available to me while I've lived here. I work in the Back Bay, and that means that museums, historical sites, ice skating on the Frog Pond, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and Pops, and various theatres have been literally within short walking distance of me every day. I've enjoyed being able to leave work and go to a performance or show (my sister, an undergrad at Boston University (BU) and I had season tickets to the touring Broadway shows that come into town, and I have had season tickets to the BSO each year, plus the random one-off stuff I've done by myself or with friends). I love getting tickets to the Red Sox through work or other sources and walking over to Fenway. I love hitting up restaurants in the North End and stopping for pastries at Modern or Mike's on the way back down Hanover Street, I love summer Sunday brunches on the patio of a restaurant on Newbury Street, I love finding fun new bars in Allston and Brookline, I love cheering on friends at the finish line to the Boston Marathon, etc. Most of all, I love knowing that there's so much to do around town, whether or not I take advantage of it. Now, I'm sure I won't be wallowing on my couch in Charlottesville bemoaning the fact that there's nothing to do during my copious free time, but I'm pretty sure that will be more because I don't have free time than because there's soooo much to do. I'm sure I will find plenty to do, like visit Monticello/Williamsburg, hit up the amazing wineries (um...where do I sign up, and who's coming with?), hike (riiiiight...I'll have to work on this one), and find new favorite dining establishments....but I still suspect that I'll miss the abundance of everything that is available in Boston. :-( I guess it's time for a new adventure....