What's happening in Boston this week?

Boston's weekly food calendar starts at Haymarket, the open-air produce market on Blackstone Street that has run every Friday and Saturday since the 1830s. Vendors set up around 6am and start shouting prices by 7. You'll smell overripe stone fruit and fish from 20 feet away. Prices drop as Saturday afternoon wears on, and the bargain hunters show up around 3pm. On Sundays from May through October, the SoWa Open Market takes over 460 Harrison Avenue in the South End with more than 100 vendors. The food truck row along the parking lot side tends to have a 15-minute line by noon. Worth noting, the North End's Italian restaurants on Hanover Street and Salem Street run 45-minute waits on Friday and Saturday nights without a reservation. Tuesday and Wednesday are the quieter nights for walk-ins at places like Giacomo's on Hanover, where the line typically drops to about 20 minutes.

Monday is the weak day for Boston's museums. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, open since 1903 on Evans Way in the Fenway neighborhood, closes Monday. So does the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Seaport. The Museum of Fine Arts on Huntington Avenue stays open all week and currently runs late hours on Wednesdays until 10pm, when the galleries are noticeably calmer than a Saturday afternoon. By 2pm on weekends the MFA's American Wing fills to the point where you're reading wall labels over someone's shoulder. The JFK Presidential Library in Dorchester's Columbia Point opens 7 days, and weekday mornings before 11am you might have the main exhibit hall to yourself. The Freedom Trail, a 2.5-mile red-brick-lined route laid out in 1951 from Boston Common to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, works any day. National Park Service rangers lead free guided walks most frequently Thursday through Sunday.

Mid-June temperatures in Boston sit around 24°C during the day and drop to about 15°C after sunset. The humidity is currently low, around 47%, which makes walking comfortable enough for the full Freedom Trail without stopping every block. The Charles River Esplanade fills with runners and cyclists before 8am every morning, and the stretch between the Hatch Shell and the BU Bridge is the most popular 2-mile loop. Boston Common, established in 1634 and the oldest public park in the country, is best in the early morning when the Frog Pond area is quiet and the squirrels are aggressive about your coffee cup. The Public Garden next door runs the Swan Boats daily, about $5 per adult for a 15-minute ride on the lagoon. By afternoon the benches fill up, and the air smells like warm grass and the hot dog cart near the corner of Charles Street and Beacon Street.

Boston's bar scene shuts down earlier than you might expect. Last call is 2am by Massachusetts law, and most neighborhood bars in South Boston and Jamaica Plain start winding down by 1:15am. Thursday night is the college-crowd night around Faneuil Hall and along Lansdowne Street near Fenway Park. Friday and Saturday the Seaport District fills up, though cocktails there run $16-19. For a quieter evening, the bars along Cambridge's Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Porter Square keep a more conversational volume on weeknights. Red Sox home games at Fenway Park happen 3-4 times a week during the season. Game-night traffic around Kenmore Square gets thick by 5:30pm, and the Green Line's Kenmore stop will be packed. If you're not going to the game, avoid the Fenway neighborhood entirely those evenings. The warm pretzel smell from the vendors on Jersey Street carries about two blocks.