The American dream for linguists

Leonice Depina, from Cape Verde, walk with her family to a laundromat in Cambridge's ethnically diverse Inman Square neighborhood. JOHN NORDELL / STAFF

On my walk home through Cambridge each day, I sometimes pass a tweeded MIT professor or two talking physics and math, and using words I couldn't spell let alone define. Further along Portugese men chat on a street corner opposite a Brazilian beauty parlor, optimistically named Ipanema - its doors open wide to the traffic roaring by.

My neighborhood is a patchwork of immigrants, PhDs, construction workers, software engineers and hairdressers. Some are fluent in English, some just smile a greeting, and some make you feel like you're the foreigner in the barrio.

One Sunday morning a couple of years ago, I woke to loud wails coming from several directions. As I lay there, trying to decide what to do, the alarm radio clicked on and a commentator announced that Brazil had just scored against Germany in the World Cup. Two hours later, local Brazilians were honking their way down the main street waving flags and wearing anything and everything in yellow and green, including towels on the head and flapping table cloths.

The local supermarket looks like the UN with shopping carts - carts filled with unidentifiable vegetables and odd-looking fruit. One can't help being a linguist in my corner of Boston. I love hearing the foreign tongues and experiencing the edges of cultures these people have relinquished for the proverbial American dream.

But I'm a foreigner, too, all the way from London, England, and I can appreciate the desire to maintain vestiges of one's heritage even as one embraces a new country. The restaurants perhaps offer some of the best of that foreignness.

Helmand, an Afghan treat, is run by Hamid Karzai's brother-in-law, and serves kebabs and fresh baked bread that defy description. Machu Picchu, a Peruvian haunt, offers the most delicious ceviche along with Inca cola (that looks like radiator fluid - if you're into brightly colored drinks).

If travel isn't in your budget, you can get a taste of many things foreign by wandering a few short blocks near Inman Square in Cambridge.

— by Susan Llewelyn Leach

'Bertha Foster' garden - Dave Hauck	Chat up someone, anyone - Jim Bencivenga	Beantown music scene - J. Johnson
What's foreign found local - Susan Leach	How to walk in Boston - Judy Lowe	Just take a walk - Greg Lamb
Delegates unite - walk! - Greg Palmer	Where to go for some seafood - Daigo Fujiwara	Seek out a quiet moment - Tom Regan
'To think that I saw it on Newbury St.!' - Christina McCarroll	Some antiquarian bookstores of Boston - Tom Toth