CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - There are college towns. And then there is Cambridge.
Off Massachusetts Avenue, just a short walk from Boston's famed Newbury Street shopping district, sits the massive brain power of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stroll down the road a bit through Central Square and you'll find a modest institution called Harvard, its brick-and-mortar design motif suggesting an academic kingdom.
Yes, some smart people set up shop around here, including lefty linguist Noam Chomsky and African-American studies pioneer Henry Louis Gates Jr., recently famous for his run-in with Cambridge police.
I had the pleasure of living in Cambridge for the last year, thanks to a fellowship from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. I spent my share of time burying my nose in books, but it didn't take long to realize there's a lot more to do in Cambridge than study.
Movies and theater, food and drink, historical sites and neighborhood walks: It's a big city nestled into a small town, the best of two very smart worlds. Here are a few tips on how to make the most of your visit, be it for a weekend or a bit longer.
Harvard has had about 375 years to build a sense of history. So it's no surprise that so many visitors want to take a walk through the Yard. This is the idyllic center of campus, distinguished by clean lines of crisscrossing walking paths and green grass. (Contrary to the heavily accented phrase, it's very difficult to actually "pahk the cah at Hahvahd Yahd.")
You can certainly soak up all of the red-brick architecture without assistance. But if you're a names-and-dates kind of person, you might consider an Unofficial Tour, in which impossibly chipper undergraduates project to the heavens and guide visitors through centuries of Harvard arcana.
Learn where Samuel Adams and Matt Damon lived. Find out why it's a bad idea to touch the toe of the John Harvard statue for good luck. (Seems mischievous students have been known to smear icky substances on it.) Discover that the John Harvard statue doesn't actually look like John Harvard. Some of the popular legends smell a little apocryphal, which doesn't make them less entertaining. And did we mention the tour guides are really chipper?
Of course, Harvard isn't the only college sightseeing game in town. Wanna see a really long hallway? Head up to the main entrance of MIT on Massachusetts Avenue and take a lengthy jaunt down the Infinite Corridor, all 825 feet of it. The pedestrian artery that connects the east and west sides of campus can give you vertigo if you stare down it long enough. And because it's at MIT, someone will probably be on hand to provide a scientific explanation of vertigo.
Between the four main squares - Harvard, Central, Inman and Porter (plus nearby Davis, which veers into the town of Somerville) - Cambridge boasts all the eateries and watering holes you can handle. Before we get into some favorites, here's a word to the wise: Last call in these parts is 1 a.m. There is one exception to this rule, which we'll get to in a moment.
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