This Magazine Is One Big Conversation

Walk around The Plaza with an open map and a perplexed look, and a local will help you find what you're looking for. It's probably just on the next block. —Eliot Kohen, 65, moved to Santa Fe in 1976 For breakfast at Cafe Pasqual's, order the huevos motuleños—eggs over easy on corn tortillas with black beans, feta, and bananas. Get it Christmas style, with red and green salsas (pasquals.com, $12). —Genia Michaela, actress Each room is different at the El Rey Inn, a 1930s adobe motel with kiva fireplaces and lush rose gardens (elreyinnsantafe.com, from $84). —Janet Buchbinder, 56 No meal says home to me like red-chile cheese enchiladas with posole, a hominy-like dish, and a Silver Coin Margarita at The Shed (sfshed.com, $7.50). —Stephanie Reynolds, 41 More than 300 vendors sell folk art, salsa, cowboy boots, Native American jewelry, and much more at the Tesuque Pueblo Flea Market (Exit 171 off U.S. 84). —Karen Gano, medical social worker Since it opened 33 years ago, Jackalope has grown into a six-and-a-half-acre international bazaar with an animal barn, a furniture store, and a glassblowing studio for local artists (jackalope.com). —G.M. On the weekends, yuppies flock to Ten Thousand Waves, the famous onsen-style spa. Any other time, the spa is all yours; soak in a hot bath overlooking the mountains—it's all very Southwestern Zen (tenthousandwaves.com, 55-minute private bath $29). —J.B. Hike the Atalaya Mountain Trail, a path from the edge of town into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The trek gets steep near the top, but the payoff is worth it: sweeping views of the Rio Grande valley and an unbeatable panorama of the city. —Stacey Lydon, 27

This Month's Prize! Costa Rica The best response we receive between June 27, 2009, and Aug. 28, 2009, wins a 14-night trip for two to Costa Rica from Planeterra Foundation. Spend five days volunteering on a sea turtle conservation project and 10 days exploring. Prize includes flights, lodgings, transport, and some meals. Trip must be booked by May 31, 2010, and must be completed by Dec. 31, 2010. For more info: 800/465-5600, planeterra.org. How to enter: E-mail us at TrueStories@BudgetTravel.com or mail us at True Stories, Budget Travel, 530 Seventh Ave., New York, NY 10018. Estimated value: $4,500. Taxes are the responsibility of the winner. Nontransferable; nonnegotiable; blackout dates may apply. Contest open to residents of the 50 United States and its territories, except Arizona. Full guidelines: BudgetTravel.com/truestories. Trip Winner July/August's winner is Nadine Kosloski of Park Ridge, Ill. Her prize is a three-night all-inclusive trip to Los Cabos, Mexico, courtesy of Dreams Los Cabos Suites Golf Resort & Spa and Los Cabos Convention & Visitors Bureau. In the Bahamas, our family visited the Straw Market. The colorful displays weren't enough to interest our 3-year-old daughter, and she fell asleep on my husband's shoulder. I continued through the market with our older daughter. After a while, we turned a corner and were surprised to see my husband and daughter behind a table selling hats. The vendor had graciously offered her chair to my husband and then asked if he would watch her table while she went to the washroom. He agreed, and joined the other vendors in vying for the buyers' attention. The woman was gone for only 15 minutes, but my husband managed to sell two hats! Attack of the guinea pig At Pisac Market in Peru's Sacred Valley, a man was cooking something I couldn't quite see. Then I realized what was smoking over the fire—cuy, or guinea pig, a local favorite. The chef picked up a fresh-grilled cuy for our photo op. Before I could move, hot juices poured from my soon-to-be entrée onto my legs and feet, and click—the photo was snapped. Allison Koester, Seattle, Wash. Very slow on the uptake On a trip to Greece with my best friend, Effie, we visited relatives on her mom's side in a tiny village. The toilet was a hole in the ground. To flush, you rinsed the bowl by dumping a bucket of water in. A few days later, we left for her dad's family home. Their bathroom was also outside and I saw no way to flush the toilet, so I assumed it worked like the other one. Every day for a week, I would fill a bucket with water, heave it to the outhouse, and whoosh it down the drain. I noticed that when I would finish, Effie's family would look at me with bewildered expressions. Finally, the day before we left, her uncle pulled me aside and said, "You Americans make things so hard on yourselves—work, work, work." He took me into the bathroom and pointed up—there was a cord hanging from the ceiling to flush the loo. They hadn't told me because they wanted to see how long it would take me to catch on. Elizabeth Mary Hickey, Swampscott, Mass. Did he punch the friars? My husband and his twin brother have a game they've played since they were kids. It involves making a circle over your heart with your thumb and forefinger—whoever does it first gets to punch the other one. (Must be a guy thing!) The game is now played via photos from vaca­tions around the world. My brother-in-law and his wife went to Egypt last spring and sent us a picture of themselves doing the circle thing on camels with the pyramids in the background. Of course, my husband had to have a comeback, so when he and I visited Rome in May, he had three Franciscan friars do the circle thing in St. Peter's Basilica. His brother will have a hard time trumping this one. Michelle O'Nale, Palm Harbor, Fla. At least you got some exercise Before I headed to Scotland a couple of years ago, a colleague asked if I could bring him back some brown sauce from Chippy's. Thus began a daylong search for a restaurant called Chippy's. I walked into a fish-and-chips restaurant and saw some brown sauce, but I thought to myself, This isn't Chippy's. Defeated, I returned to the States and met with laughter. "A chippy, not Chippy's. It's slang for a fish-and-chips joint!" my friend said. Somehow, I had disregarded the "a." I had walked past six chippies, had eaten at one, and had even seen the brown sauce, but still came back empty-handed. Lola Akinmade, Owings Mills, Md. Newest item on the travel checklist: eye surgery After arriving at my Miami Beach hotel, I couldn't wait to enter the warm surf that I remembered from childhood. I swam into deep water and saw a neon-colored toy a few feet away. I grabbed it and was amazed to watch it slither onto my hand and arm. Then the stinging began. I thrashed to shore, and the lifeguard ran me up to the hotel's ice machine and stuck my arm in it. "First time I've seen someone grab a Portuguese man-of-war," he noted. Back home, I scheduled the corrective eye surgery I had long postponed. Elizabeth Morelli, Richmond, Va. If that's what a Thai blessing does to you, we'll pass I was at a temple in Thailand with my Thai mother-in-law and my husband. My mother-in-law picked up some bottled water there. While she was in the temple, I drank one of the bottles. When she came out, she asked, "Where's my holy water?" So that's why all the locals had stared at me while I drank it! About two hours later, after a big Thai lunch, I started to feel queasy. I threw up every 20 minutes for the next six hours, and then my mother-in-law finally took me to the emergency room. After one magic pill, I was better. Guess I must have been very blessed by all that holy water! Jeanne McNamara, Zephyr Cove, Nev. You got set up! My husband and I celebrated our 10th anniversary on St. Kitts, where we found a tiny beach bar. A man there had a monkey on his shoulder, and I asked if I could hold it. I asked what the monkey's name was, and the man replied, "Spank." I said, "Spank the Monkey is so cute!" The bar erupted in laughter. I was clueless until my husband explained it. Oops—I get it now! Micah Humphries, Rossmoor, Calif. Terror loves company Three friends and I, after recovering from heart attacks, decided to get in shape and took up backpacking. We went to Grand Teton and, the very first evening, heard a noise and saw a black bear approaching our camp. He sat down a dangerous 30 yards away and just stared at us for a full five minutes before he moved out of our line of sight. When we finally crawled into our sleeping bags, my friends proceeded to remove their hearing aids, and I realized I was the only one who would be able to detect any further bear noises. Not OK. So I said loudly, "Did you hear that?!" They all sat up, put in their hearing aids, and began to listen. Now that I knew we could all hear, I rolled over and had a good night's sleep. Don Glendenin, Springfield, Ohio

Going Native Farmstays, villa rentals, mountain refuges. Six ways to immerse yourself in the real Italy. (Hint: If the owner of your rental room asks you to pretend you're a relative, just go with it.) See the slide show Cool Hunting 2009 We asked top hoteliers in London, Texas, New York, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City to tell us about the best new design discoveries in each destination. See the slide show Boston (Both Ways) Every big city has two versions: the one people call home, and the one people visit. A longtime Bostonian searches for common ground. See the slide show Picasso's Provence Long known as the home of Cézanne, the region is celebrating Picasso this summer with exhibits and a peek into his château. Live Well, Get Miles Secrets for scoring and redeeming more frequent-flier miles. Road Trip: National Parks Skip the crowds and follow these four itineraries to great lodges, restaurants, and adventures along the way. See the slide show Real Deals This month, all 32 exclusive packages are packed with even greater value. Ireland, Egypt, Italy, and more.

I can't remember the first time I was quacked at, but I remember how I felt: You've got to be kidding. I'd be walking somewhere in the city, and suddenly a giant amphibious bus full of people would materialize, quack loudly at me and my fellow Bostonians, and vanish. Soon enough I would learn that these were Duck Tours, shuttling tourists from one Boston landmark to another. And just as quickly, I'd learn to avoid going anywhere they went. Like a New Yorker who never sets foot in Times Square, I have long made a fetish of keeping clear of the stereotypical Boston—the Revolutionary War monuments, the walking trails, the souvenir-strewn streets around Fenway Park. Let the out-of-towners move through their Boston, I figure, and I'll stick to mine. After 15 years of living here, I still look at the tourists and wonder: What are they seeing—and what am I missing? And what are they missing? I decided there was only one way to find out. Paul Revere: closet Frenchman? If I'm going to play tourist in my hometown, I know where to start: The Paul Revere House. If you live in Boston, you would never, ever go there. It's in the middle of the Freedom Trail, the more than two-mile-long path that guides people through the most important Revolutionary War monuments while letting them skip everything else. Somehow it precisely evokes my fifth grade conception of creaky old Boston. The house today sits incongruously in its neighborhood, its three floors of spooky brown clapboard dwarfed by apartment buildings. Revere's house isn't crowded the day I visit, which is a good thing because it's absolutely tiny. It's also wildly off-square in every way, as though someone squeezed a normal house into a lozenge and set it down on tilted ground. I push the wooden door open and promptly find myself in a kitchen—a stone hearth with a bewildering array of iron implements for everything from toasting bread to ironing frilled cuffs. Unless you're a history buff, you won't care exactly which turned-wood chairs belonged to the Revere family and which are here just for show. The house is an imperfect museum of Paul Revere himself, whose wartime heroism was exaggerated and whose major role in the city was as an entrepreneur who made a fortune in metals after the revolution. (Also, surprise: He was half French! His father was Apollos Rivoire, who anglicized the name.) Yet as a little diorama of Boston's colonial history, the house is unparalleled. In the years after Paul Revere, it sheltered the waves of immigrants who transformed the city, and today it sits in the middle of an Italian neighborhood abutted by gleaming new condos—the setting itself a little diorama of Boston. The North End my way A block from Paul Revere's house is Hanover Street, the lively main drag running through the North End, a neighborhood full of Italian restaurants and pastry shops. Stop in for a cappuccino at the longtime fixture Caffé Vittoria and admire the collection of vintage espresso machines. Survey the assortment of cheese, artisanal salami and prosciutto, and aged balsamic vinegar at Salumeria Italiana on Richmond Street. If you want to eat where Bostonians eat, make your way to Carmen, a trattoria made cozy by brick walls lined with wine bottles and an embossed-tin ceiling. Alternately, cross Hanover Street, turn left toward Salem Street, and head to Neptune Oyster: Its white tiles and dark wood evoke an old-school seafood bar, and the menu merges the classic (shrimp cocktail) and the creative (shrimp gazpacho with baby fennel moustarda). America's oldest ballpark Not all of Boston's tourist attractions have centuries of history behind them. The baseball stadium is a relative newcomer, a wee 97 years old. What still amazes me every time I approach Fenway Park is how intimately it's tucked into the city: You're strolling through a Boston neighborhood and hey, whaddya know, one of the buildings just happens to be the oldest major-league ballpark in America. As easy as it is to stumble upon Fenway, it's not nearly as simple to gain entry. Every single game since 2003 has sold out. But there is another way to see the park: Fenway runs tours for $12. I buy a ticket and squeeze into a luxury suite on an off-season Saturday morning. A video tells the history of the stadium in photographs and newspaper headlines. We watch footage of Ted Williams's last at-bat here, in 1960; the ball sails over center field and into the bullpen and fixes him in baseball legend. I am pleased to notice that the video's narrator really is from Boston; beneath his polished voice are the city's lost-and-found r's—"pahk," and "ah-chi-tect." Afterward, we walk out into the seats and take pictures of each other in front of the Green Monster, Fenway's famously high left-field wall. The tour visits different spots in the park depending on when you go; the only truly off-limits area is the field's sacred grass. "I've been working here a year," says our tour guide, "and I've never even stepped on it." That might seem extreme, but then again, Fenway is such a shrine that fans build small models of it and wear them as hats. Seriously. Fenway my way If you have managed to score a pair of tickets to a game, the next challenge is food. My advice: Pick up an Italian sausage with peppers and onions from the sidewalk cart of the famed Sausage King, parked outside Gate E for many games. But if you haven't gotten tickets, all is not lost: Walk along the Lansdowne Street wall of the ballpark and look for The Bleacher Bar. It's a hopping sports pub actually built into the left-center-field wall—its ceiling is the underside of the stadium seats, and a garage-door-size window looks straight onto the field. A few blocks away, Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks offers a more stylish setting; the airy restaurant and lounge is best known for its craft cocktails like the whiskey smash and the Sazerac, served at a long marble-topped bar. Boston's first shopping mall I have been a tourist in Boston for a week before I steel myself for Faneuil Hall Marketplace, the Revolutionary-era mall at the heart of downtown. On some level I think of Faneuil Hall as the most bogus thing in Boston—a kind of colonial-brick flypaper that attracts school groups and visiting uncles so the rest of us can have the city to ourselves. The actual Historic Faneuil Hall is a real colonial meeting house, but if you see only the first-floor shops, it's easy to imagine that you've been sent to some kind of tourist hell of postcards, candy-by-weight, and a Ben Franklin impersonator with fake colonial buckles strapped to his shoes. I head outside, pull open the building's middle door, and ascend to an entirely different realm: a quiet, balconied meeting hall with portrait busts and a billboard-size painting of Daniel Webster. The hall was used by fist-pounding revolutionaries in the 1700s and still draws audiences—how many rooms in the world have hosted both George Washington and the Dalai Lama? Back outside, I plunge into the center of the beehive: Quincy Market, a long indoor passageway framed by classical columns and holding dozens of food stalls—a food court in fancy clothing. I buy a cup of surprisingly good clam chowder, climb the stairs in the building's rotunda, and just sit. Above me is a magnificent oval dome of cream and robin's egg blue; sunlight streams through the oculus in the middle. Why have I never noticed this before? The area is ringed by chain stores, but there are some local curiosities as well. Across the street, the large outdoor food bazaar known as the Haymarket puts on its chaotic show every Friday and Saturday. And then, of course, there is Durgin-Park. The restaurant, established in 1826, is famous for its rude waitresses, but I feel like I can detect real warmth in the way mine clangs the silverware down on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. The food is thick and old-fashioned—the baked beans are sweet enough to be dessert, and the actual dessert is Indian pudding, an oddball dish of warm, molasses-flavored cornmeal with a scoop of ice cream. I wouldn't want to eat here every day, or even every month, but it's fun to be reminded of what "Boston" used to mean to cooks. Shopping Boston my way Though it has entertainment value, I would never send relatives to do any shopping in or around Faneuil Hall. To shop where Boston shops, head to the city's commercial center: Copley Square, flanked by Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library. Then walk up Newbury Street to see local landmarks like Newbury Comics, art galleries selling portraits of Boston's founding families, and designer boutiques alongside consignment shops. Or cross Boston Public Garden to Charles Street for an eclectic mix of shops like Good, which stocks home accessories and handmade jewelry and glassware, and Period Furniture Hardware, where you can dress up your old colonial with hard-to-find antique-style trimmings. The world's oldest warship Toward the far end of the Freedom Trail—and I do mean far; it takes me 20 minutes to walk across the bridge to Charlestown—the 211-year-old black hulk of the USS Constitution rises out of the water. This is the world's oldest warship still afloat, a three-masted frigate that has survived wars and Barbary pirates. When I get there, though, the first thing I think is: Old Ironsides is broken. The deck is covered with a temporary roof, and the ship's towering masts, normally 200 feet high, look like they've been snapped off. It turns out that the deck is being re-floored—a fact of life for any old ship. In normal times, the Constitution can still sail, and it's staffed with an active-duty Navy crew. I join a tour given by Tony Barnardo, a petty officer whose last deployment was on a carrier in the Persian Gulf. Tony clearly regards this ship as part of the same Navy he serves in—he speaks in the first person about its achievements. "We fired a broadside," he says of the Constitution's role in an 1812 battle. "We basically destroyed the HMS Guerriere in 35 minutes." It takes nearly that long for our whole tour group to squeeze down the narrow, steep stairwell to the lower decks, where a strange world opens up. The life of a sailor, 200 years ago, was incredibly constrained: You lived amid ropes and iron and gunpowder, and slept four hours at a time in a hammock. You ate bread so hard that you needed to soak it in soup first. You could be as young as 8. Boston is a port town but no longer a Navy one, so it's interesting to imagine a city whose marketplaces and theaters were flush with sailors. If you read the Boston papers, you know that history isn't just trivia here, either: News recently emerged that the bodies of British soldiers may have been located under the backyards of several family homes just a few hundred yards away from the ship. Boston history my way There are two worthwhile museums near the ship—a Navy exhibit on the Constitution's pier and a separate museum about the ship itself. Equally worthy is the rest of Charlestown, a charming, gaslit neighborhood of 19th-century town houses that's home to the Bunker Hill Monument. Stop for a burger at Warren Tavern, over 225 years old and one of the first buildings to go up in the rebuilding of Charlestown after the British burned it. Learning to quack My personal boycott of the Boston Duck Tours ends on a brisk, sunny Saturday morning when I climb into a huge red amphibious vehicle called the Tub of the Hub and surrender to the idea that I will ride noisily around my hometown yelling "quack!" at totally blameless pedestrians who will look at me and think, What a loser. You've probably seen something like a duck tour—a land-and-water excursion where a bus loads up with about 30 people and, at some point in the itinerary, drives straight into the water and floats. The vehicle I'm on was built in the 1940s to carry freight for amphibious attacks like D-day. "You can't beat tootling around in a World War II military vehicle," says Lance Cheung, a visitor from Texas who has done this before. "You get more stares than if you were in a Lamborghini." I notice a guy on the sidewalk wearing a motley assortment of sports jerseys—a Red Sox shirt over a Bruins jersey over green Celtics pants. Only in Boston, I think to myself, at which point he clambers up the steps and introduces himself as Mike, our tour guide. It takes about 90 seconds for me to realize that Mike was born to do this job. Before the first traffic light has changed, he has trained the entire bus to quack loudly together on cue. (Yes, me too.) He shepherds traffic around the bus and brakes regularly so people onboard can get pictures—all while unleashing a tidal wave of history and sports lore. He flags the sites of America's oldest restaurant (the Union Oyster House, where in 1796, future French king Louis-Philippe lived in exile on the second floor) and oldest continually operating hotel (the Parker House, which has hosted nearly every U.S. president since Ulysses S. Grant). By the time the thing circles beneath a highway ramp and finally plunges into the Charles River, I find myself mentally enumerating the people I would recommend this to. We float down the Charles between Boston and Cambridge, gazing at a panorama of the Back Bay that most visitors never see from the water. As much as I hate to admit it, it takes a man dressed in full Boston sports team regalia to help me see the city in a way I've never seen it before. Anyone who spends an hour listening to Mike talk, or an afternoon walking the Freedom Trail, or just a moment taking in the architecture of Quincy Market, will actually get Boston in some important way. The city is a lot more than the campy, fake-shoe-buckles version of its past, but that part is inseparable from what it is now: a lively and idiosyncratic American city woven from the convoluted streets and dense neighborhoods of a little colonial outpost. OPERATORS Boston Duck Tours 617/267-3825, bostonducktours.com, $30, kids 3–11 $20, under 3 $6 FOOD Caffé Vittoria 290-296 Hanover St., 617/227-7606, vittoriacafe.com Salumeria Italiana 151 Richmond St., 617/523-8743, salumeriaitaliana.com Carmen 33 North Sq., 617/742-6421, carmenboston.com, entrées from $19 Neptune Oyster 63 Salem St., 617/742-3474, neptuneoyster.com, entrées from $24 Sausage King Outside Gate E on Lansdowne St. Durgin-Park 340 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, 617/227-2038, durgin-park.com, entrées from $11 Warren Tavern 2 Pleasant St., Charlestown, 617/241-8142, warrentavern.com, burgers from $8 ACTIVITIES The Paul Revere House 19 North Sq., 617/523-2338, paulreverehouse.org, $3.50, kids $1 Fenway Park 4 Yawkey Way, 877/733-7699, redsox.com, tickets from $12, tours $12, kids $10 Historic Faneuil Hall Faneuil Hall Sq., 617/242-5690, cityofboston.gov, free USS Constitution 1 Constitution Rd., 617/242-5670, ussconstitution.navy.mil, free Bunker Hill Monument Monument Sq., Charlestown, 617/242-5641, nps.gov/bost, free SHOPPING Haymarket North, Blackstone, and Hanover Sts., Fridays and Saturdays dawn to dusk Newbury Comics 332 Newbury St., 617/236-4930, newburycomics.com Good 88 Charles St., 866/426-4663, shopatgood.com Period Furniture Hardware 123 Charles St., 617/227-0758, pfhco.com NIGHTLIFE The Bleacher Bar 82A Lansdowne St., 617/262-2424, bleacherbarboston.com Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks 528 Commonwealth Ave., 617/532-9100, easternstandardboston.com