24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps 3.75 stars?, December 29, 2002
This review is from: Relocating to Boston and Surrounding Areas: Everything You Need to Know Before You Move and After You Get There! (Paperback)
Entertaining a move to Boston, I bought this book on a whim. It's a nice guide and will give you a general overview, but I wanted more meat. I suppose I'd be in a better position to judge had I actually moved at this point. It does give some nice information by neighborhood, so you could theoretically find a dry cleaner/coffee shop/hardware store your first week in town if you needed to. A little too much of the book (for my taste) was devoted to moving basics...like a packing timeline, etc. I already know this stuff or would consult UHaul if I didn't...I would rather have had more Boston info in the book. The writer clearly loves the city and is proud to share it, and isn't afraid to discuss the city's foibles (traffic, parking and high -- really high -- cost of living). If you're looking to move to Boston, I'd buy this in tandem with another book or two -- just to make sure you're getting everything you need.
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19 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Prepare for Wicked Haht-bu(hrh)n, July 25, 2006
This review is from: Relocating to Boston and Surrounding Areas: Everything You Need to Know Before You Move and After You Get There! (Paperback)
[Those of you born and raised in Boston, feel free to just skip to the last two paragraphs]
The book advertises itself as "everything you need to know before you move and after you get there!" That's quite ambitious. There can't be too many places more challenging to move to than Boston, the single most passive-aggressive city in the world. Everything about Boston is charming and quaint from a distance and hostile in the here and now. For example, you can use no logic or intuition to find your way around if you get lost. None of the normal rules apply. Streets veer off on such subtle and off angles, intersecting with each other three to five at a time in intersections with no known corresponding geometrical shape with which to describe them. Several streets have the same name, like Beacon, which starts and stops in several places having nothing to do with each other. The best illustration of this is the fact the Tremont intersects with itself. It's true, there is an intersection of Tremont and Tremont, as denoted by a couple demure little street signs that you will see if you already know they're there. You feel like you've slipped off the space-time continuum. You can drive for miles without seeing a street sign, unless a street has a commemorative sign, being named after a local politician you've never heard of. And the endless arrays of completely arbitrary one-way streets (why not just alternate?). Then you have the round-abouts. These traffic circles are actually kind of fun once you get how to do it, but they are not kind on newcomers. Nor are the other drivers, who drive worse than New Yorkers, worse than many urban third-world cities for that matter.
But you've gotta love those beautiful, quaint cobblestone streets. Nothing like rolling your ankle on those pseudo-aged bricks while the MBTA bus driver races off feigning obliviousness. Which takes me to the citizens, those wonderful Mass masses. Once you get to know them, they are just like people anywhere, you can make great friends. But they'll let you sweat about two years trying to break the ice. If you smile and say Hi to a stranger on the street, you'll be greeted with suspicion at best (especially jarring if you come from the mid-west). And don't bother trying to tell someone from Boston that there are other places around the country that are also nice to live.
And the accent. You gotta be kidding me. Dropping the R's is one thing, but when they start putting the R's on the end of words that end in vowels, then you know they are just messing with the rest of us, you have to be doing that on purpose (although it is fun after a while). Even the revolving doors are passive aggressive. They move automatically, but then stop suddenly and freeze, let you sweat a little bit, the voice, "Please!" the voice of an angry, middle-aged, jilted, life-long cigarette smoking, nickel-slot playing woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, "please! Please step forward. Please do not push the door." And wait to you hear what the landlords are charging these days for a 600 square feet, where you have to move your tandem parked cars the whole day on garbage day despite a two-hour limit on street parking.
Still, despite the near impossible ambitions of this book, making moving to Boston a pleasant experience, it is a handy little book to have. There are tons of books for sight-seeing, weekend getaways, and great restaurants, but I'd wait until you get a feel for your new budget to look at those. What you need when moving there, especially if you haven't spent much time there, is the real skinny on the neighborhoods. Which cities or towns are on their way up, which ones are on the way down. They actually have pie graphs breaking down the neighborhoods by ethnicity, gender, and age (stuff you want to know but don't necessarily want to ask your creepy realtor) median home and condo sales (which need to be extrapolated if you get an edition more than a year old), crime, income, parking, the type of government, and the commute.
It would have been nice however to also have a word or two about the public school systems in each of the neighborhoods, although there many neighborhoods in which it would be difficult to craft a non-offensive honest description. To their credit, they do include the numbers for the Boston Fair Housing Commission and other resources that are useful to have on hand as soon as the landlords start to try and rip you off.
By the way, don't let my portrayal of the harrowing transition fool you, I love this city. Great restaurants, great libraries, nice parks, great museums, a world class orchestra, good sports, and as Gaffin observes in the section on "What's Around Town," with all the colleges, lectures, bookstores, second-run cinemas and art theaters "you won't want for intellectual stimulation in Boston." And the people are great. They take forever to warm up, but once they do they are loyal friends. Plus, there are enough people in Boston who also aren't from Boston to water down the East Coast snobbiness. Yeah, I'll enjoy it more when I can afford it more, but I'm having my fun as it is.
Plus, if the people of Boston care about their sports, they will make every effort to keep me here. I won't go into all the statistics here, but everywhere I've moved, the local sports teams have experienced a significant upsurge in their fortunes. I'm not kidding. And it's no coincidence. I'll give you the numbers if you want them, you can construct your own chi square and see. Highly significant. So make it worth my while people (that also goes for people in other cities who might be interested in recruiting me to see their fortunes turn around).
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