Xinh Xinh Restaurant, Boston Chinatown

One of the best things about working on DTX is that you are within walking distance of Chinatown. A nice ramble and brushing up with the fabric of society brings you to a goldmine of Asian restaurants.

Up at the far end, the Washington Street end, are a bunch of Vietnamese restaurants. The Vietnamese moved into the neighborhood back when Boston's Combat Zone was still alive. It was dying but very much dealing in the skin trade, so real estate was cheap up there. Now there's only one strip club left, and while I've never been inside, it looks pretty tame on the outside.

Anyway, on a good day or when I want to treat myself, I head for Chinatown. Sometimes Saigon Sandwich. Super cheap sandwiches or little lunches for $2.50 consisting of rice or noodles, and chicken, pork, or beef.

Today I went to Xinh Xinh Restaurant and had takeout of chicken with lemon grass. The takeout was awesome. As you can see from Yelp, sit down meals are pretty darn good, too.

But it's not just for the food that I go to Chinatown. I guess, in one sense, I've never grown up. Growing up in the Midwest, I always wanted to be somewhere else. It seemed I never fit in. So, by the time I was 12 or 13, I was jumping on the #4 bus from Montgomery and riding to downtown Cincinnati. There I'd hang out in hotel lobbies and pretend I was a guest of the hotel. Pretty weird, huh.

All these number of years later, so much water over the bridge or under the dam, wherever the hell water goes, you'd think my imagination would have been shut off by now. But I go to Chinatown to take my mind out of the world. With not much work, I can transport myself to a more exotic place. And that's what I did today.

Different voices, different language, people who aren't so mainstream, who don't wrinkle their nose and say, it smells bad. (Chinatown does smell of garbage and a lot of other things including great food and city and funk and everything.)

Someday I hope to be living entirely in that world, and not just a little closet of that world, a little restaurant in Boston's Chinatown. And today, for about 10 minutes, it was pretty cool.