Not specifically about Boston, but as a small town girl on my one trip to Chicago I could not get over being surrounded by skyscrapers and not being able to see very far around me. Very claustrophobic for someone used to miles of open land and sky.
There is a Davis Sq LJ and you could certainly ask your question of the maintainers.
Also, there are three major REALLY GOOD universities (Tufts, Harvard, MIT) just outside of Boston which are wildly different from one another, and there's UMass Boston which is commuter-only and is wholly unlike any other good university I have encountered, but highly unlikely to have trust fund kids. And there's Lesley and Emerson and Suffolk, and that's all within rapid transit boundaries. Further out you have Bentley in Waltham, a good school but something of an MBA factory, and that would be my first bet for trust fund babies.
(There are a raft of others, including Brandeis, which I attended.)
That's really helpful, actually, and definitely helps with picturing my MC's life back home -- he grew up perhaps 'working class' or 'near poor'. He's surprisingly sheltered from poverty for someone who grew up right on it (based on my own experiences there), but his idea of 'middle class' is much different from the ideas of the people he's with right now. He himself is half-Moroccan, identifies as white, but has rather dark skin even by the standards of his background, and I've been working under the assumption that he's a bit of an oddity compared to the people he sees on a regular basis. But his parents are neo-hippies, so he's involved in pretty white social groups.
And yeah, I figured the parts of Maine people congregate around weren't that close to Canada. His maternal family lives there, though.
How IMPOSSIBLE it is to get around. Seriously, my dad's from Maine and even he refuses to drive in Boston. My sister needed to take a cab to the synagogue in Boston over Purim one year. BOTH WAYS, to the synagogue and back, the local native cabdrivers got lost.
A friend pointed me over here - I grew up in the Boston area, moved back in May, after nearly 4 years living in rural Maine. Things that come to mind, feel free to ask others:
GeneralThere's a fairly big different - mindset and other things - between Portland and a lot of the rest of Maine. (And as noted elsewhere in your comments, Maine is a really big state, both in term of land, and because getting anywhere that isn't on 95 can take forever because the road may not go straight there
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Comment, part 2jenettDecember 28 2015, 13:12:54 UTC
EducationMaine has the University of Maine system (which has been having some major issues recently, see also why I have a new job), but one of the notable things about it is that the Portland area campus (the University of Southern Maine, which is a little outside Portland's downtown mostly) is *not* the major campus in the system - that's Orono (in the Bangor area, about half way up the state
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On the topic of transit, I would go so far as to say that in many ways it's actively a nuisance to have a car. (I don't.) Parking is horrendous, drivers are notoriously bad ("massholes"), streets are confusing and poorly labeled and generally make driving in a grid city look like a walk in the park
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There is a Davis Sq LJ and you could certainly ask your question of the maintainers.
Also, there are three major REALLY GOOD universities (Tufts, Harvard, MIT) just outside of Boston which are wildly different from one another, and there's UMass Boston which is commuter-only and is wholly unlike any other good university I have encountered, but highly unlikely to have trust fund kids. And there's Lesley and Emerson and Suffolk, and that's all within rapid transit boundaries. Further out you have Bentley in Waltham, a good school but something of an MBA factory, and that would be my first bet for trust fund babies.
(There are a raft of others, including Brandeis, which I attended.)
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And yeah, I figured the parts of Maine people congregate around weren't that close to Canada. His maternal family lives there, though.
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GeneralThere's a fairly big different - mindset and other things - between Portland and a lot of the rest of Maine. (And as noted elsewhere in your comments, Maine is a really big state, both in term of land, and because getting anywhere that isn't on 95 can take forever because the road may not go straight there ( ... )
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