Things to Do

Stuff to Do

• Bike/run/walk around the Esplanade, along the Charles River

• New England Aquarium is a really fantastic aquarium 

• Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum - gorgeous grounds, amazing concerts (seriously, some of the best musicians period perform here), and obviously art!

• MFA - definitely go. Awesome museum.

• Shopping - head to Newbury St! There’s also the Prudential Center close by.

• Harvard’s Fogg art museum - was closed during my entire freaking tenure. Finally opened 3 weeks before Ian graduated. It’s a beautiful museum with a bunch of different types of art, and you should go because YOU CAN.

• New England Conservatory has very high quality free concerts pretty much every single day

• Boston Symphony Orchestra is PHENOMENAL

• If you do get into biking, Ian and I love to bike the Minute Man trail and go past the end of it all the way to Walden Pond in Concord, MA. It’s a 20 miles each way, so if you’re not a serious biker, maybe just do the 10 mi, flat, no-cars minute man trail itself. You can also bike 1 way to Walden and take the commuter rail back (you can bring your bikes).

• Trident Bookstore - independently owned bookstore with a restaurant in it! I recommend both aspects. 

• Paul Revere trail - worth doing once! Historical tour of Boston that you can do self-guided

• Spend time during the day in Boston Common - lovely to walk around or picnic

• Back Bay and Beacon Hill are beautiful areas to walk around

• The Hahvahd Tour is pretty fun if you have any interest in seeing the university. I believe it’s free and you just tip at the end. I gave these tours for a couple months during college.

• Head of the Charles is a major regatta that happens once a year in the fall - it can be fun to go watch from the river bank on the Cambridge side.

• House of Blues doubles as a (non-classical) music venue and a club on certain nights

Stuff Not to Do

• The area near Boston Common, especially Tremont St, can be surprisingly dangerous at night. The park itself is not lit at all, and I have had two separate friends nearly mugged at knifepoint and nearly raped, and mugged at gunpoint (the latter a 6’2” LARGE man) both on that street. Don’t walk alone in this area at night, especially on the side of the street closer to the park, and stay where it’s well lit. Definitely do not walk through Boston Common (or Cambridge Common, for that matter) at night. This area is perfectly safe during the day, so it’s especially bizarre.