For those unfamiliar with San Francisco and its many oddities, summer doesn’t really start in June — nor does it really start in July. As not-Mark-Twain so sagely put it, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” A year ago, I remember arriving as a total newcomer to the paradox of San Francisco weather and bundling up in tights and jackets in mornings that were characterized by the soul-sucking mist known as San Francisco fog, shedding the layers once the temperature peaked in the mid-60s by the middle of the day, only to throw them back on by the evening (aka a mist-filled hell). In SF, “summer” (at least summer in the traditional sense) doesn’t actually begin until mid-August, which is a total bummer for those (hello, self!) who are used to unadulteratedly sunny, breezy weather. And for somebody who adheres to the textbook definition of summer, the prospect of having to wait yet another two months for decent weather was a grim one.

Fortunately, I didn’t actually have to wait very long, as I was in Boston and Providence for the first week of June: the former to visit my parents (who happened to be on the East Coast), and the latter for work, where I was manning the booth at Google’s Get Your Business Online. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been to either of the two cities in a while — other than random visits to my Harvard friends, my time in Boston is largely defined by the summer after my junior year in high school when I had interned there, and I had last been to Providence seven years ago, when I had briefly considered applying to Brown for college (oh, the days of college visits — how young I was then!) — I mostly skipped out on the standard touristy fare and instead worked at the Google Cambridge office and … ate a lot. As terribly fascinating as working and eating sounds, I’ll spare you the details and convince all of you that I lead an exciting life by providing you with visuals of the contents of my stomach, before they ended up in my stomach. Cool? Cool!

On my second day in Boston, Annie and I went to Mistral, a French bistro in the Back Bay, where I ordered a roasted duck with wild mushroom risotto and Annie ordered the grilled salmon.

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