🔥🧊 This winter pop-up is hot ... AND cold

It’s Tuesday, Boston.

🍺 Attention, college students! Here’s a deal for you: Monday through Thursday, Night Shift Brewing’s Boston taproom offers half-priced apps for college students with an ID. Also, 25% off merch, if that’s your thing.

💉 Also … Do you get “preventative” Botox? Are you under 30? We want to talk to you for an upcoming story! Email Gia at [email protected]. 

👀 What’s on tap today:

• Mass. officials are MIA

• MBTA shutdowns are SO back

• A Chuck E. Cheese wedding

Up first…

WINTERING IN BOSTON

We’re hot and we’re cold

Skiing, tubing, and snowshoeing are New England winter staples … if you’ve got a car and money to spare.

So over the next two months, we’re testing the cheapest, easiest, most MBTA-accessible versions of popular winter to-dos to help you spice up the most depressing time of the year. 

First up: Moki’s Winter Sauna Village in Somerville.

🧖 Moki is a sauna and cold plunge pop-up *experience*. The outdoor winter village consists of three saunas and three cold plunges, a locker room, bathroom area (with heated showers), and a fire pit area. You can buy one-time passes for an hour ($45) or two ($60), or bundled, pricier packages. Moki recommends 10 to 15 minutes in the sauna and a one- to three-minute cold plunge, followed by a five-ish-minute break. Rinse and repeat. 

🏙️ Saunas and cold plunges are having a moment right now. The popularity of wellness culture draws folks in, and the physical, mental, and social benefits keep them coming back, according to Moki founder Mark Peloquin. His goal is to make that experience accessible to Bostonians: “We're trying to meet people where they are,” he said. That’s why they set up camp right outside of Aeronaut Brewery, a short walk from the Green Line’s E branch with street parking nearby. 

👙 The amenities feel boujee. At least, compared with our first pop-up sauna experience on City Hall Plaza. Despite being outside, the space was private: No brewery-goers will see you, and between the three saunas, you probably won’t need to get too up close and personal with half-naked strangers. Plus, between the bathrooms, the locker room, and the complimentary towels and sandals, there were enough amenities to make it feel pretty legit even though it’s basically in a parking lot.

🧊 The actual sauna and cold plunge were intense. As newbs, we found it challenging to truly find our zen in either the 190-ish degree sauna or the 40-ish degree cold plunge. But the option to hop between both — and having (room-temperature) spaces to hang around when we’d had enough — made it feel very doable.

😎 All that said, if you don’t mind dropping the cash, we recommend it. Yes, dropping $45-$60 seems a little steep for a sauna, but we thought the amenities and privacy justify the price (think of it as a cold-weather treat yo’ self opportunity). The novelty of running around in bathing suits mid-winter and watching your friends cold plunge (or … try to) made the experience worthwhile even if you don’t love the sauna or plunge themselves. You can book a spot here.

QUICK QUESTION!

🧊 Have you ever tried a cold plunge?

CITY

Quick & dirty headlines

🇺🇸 We officially have a new President. On Monday, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States, but a few local officials were MIA. Sen. Ed Markey and Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Bill Keating opted to sit out the ceremonies for various reasons, with Pressley hosting an MLK Day event in Boston instead. As for Trump, in his inaugural address, he swore that he would “completely and totally reverse” many Biden-era policies, and let’s just say, he didn’t waste much time kicking things off. 

🚇 Fire up the shuttle buses! Just like TikTok, MBTA shutdowns are SO back. On Friday, the agency dropped its official shutdown plans through June, but don’t worry, it won’t be exactly like last year. Long story short, there will be four nine-day shutdowns between April and June, one each on the Red and Blue Lines, and two on the Orange Line, with more deets to come. Speaking of shutdowns: The Sumner Tunnel southbound is closed overnight for maintenance. 

🥶 Mother Nature is giving us the cold shoulder. First, she sent our second significant snowfall of the season (around 5 inches in Boston). Next: She’s sending in a major cold front. From Tuesday to Thursday, Boston will be under a cold weather advisory, with sub-zero temps and wind chills expected. This is no joke, so make sure to be safe, especially if you need to be outside. Check out the city’s cold weather tips, from how to layer to how to prevent your pipes from freezing. 

🩷 DTX’s naked pink guys finally have some friends. Translation: Winteractive, Boston’s kooky outdoor public art activation, is fully up and running. Earlier this month, the giant, inflatable pink dudes unexpectedly arrived and kicked off the season. Now, the rest of this year’s over 15 works of art have joined them around the neighborhood. There’s a car that looks like it got hit by a UFO, a glowing tunnel on City Hall Plaza, a “living” lantern, and more. It’s all on exhibit through March 30. You can check out a map of all the art here.

THINGS TO DO

Weekday checklist

🥟 Eat all the dumplings your heart desires. Mei Mei Dumpings is celebrating the Lunar New Year and second b-day with a bottomless dumpling party on Saturday. Tickets sell out quickly, so get on it!

🍷 Spice up your wine night … with paint! You can do exactly that at this wine glass painting event at Castle Island Brewing tonight. 

💏 Listen in on someone’s blind date. Public nosiness and spicy questions are encouraged at the “It’s a date” comedy dating show on Wednesday, where you’ll watch four blindfolded singles take the stage.

🎲 Beat the cold with a cozy game night. Board, card, video, and trivia games are on the menu at this *elevated* game night on Wednesday, i.e., weed is welcome. 

🥕 Add some carrots to your cakes. Learn to sneak fruits, veggies, and other good stuff into your favorite treats and desserts at Clover Food Lab’s healthy baking 101 class on Thursday. 

🧀 Say more cheese, please! ‘Cause a lot of it’s on the menu this week. Gather ‘round a bubbling pot of cheese for Bar Mezzana’s fondue night on Tuesday. Then head to Batifol on Friday for raclette night. 

🗣️ Send off Boston’s Poet Laureate. You can head to the MFA on Thursday to hear Porsha Olayiwola’s final reading in the role (she’s held the title for six years!). Bonus: It’s free!

🎭 Pay what you want to see this play. Not joking! “Haunted,” a new Indigenous horror comedy featuring Y2K hits, kicks off its pay-what-you-want run at the BPL on Friday. Need convincing? The tagline is, “This is Indigenous land, biatch!”

GIVEAWAY

Together with Simple Sips

Enter to win a mixer flight of five 16 ounce bottles of our best-selling Simple Sips flavors and three rimming sugars and salts. To enter, just refer a friend and have them accept your invite by the end of the day on Jan. 23. If you have already referred a friend to B-Side (and they’ve accepted), you're eligible! Full details below*

18+. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Limit one entry per person. See Official Rules & an additional entry option here.

ONE LAST THING

I now pronounce you Chuck E. Cheesed

In 2023, Chuck E. Cheese posted an April Fool’s joke that they were offering weddings. Recently, one Mass. couple took them up on it.

Yup, MIT grads Leilani and Quilee recently had their wedding at an Everett Chuck E. Cheese for the price of a “mega fun” birthday package (it came out to around $800). Like any good Chuck E. Cheese party, this one featured all-you-can-play arcade games, questionable pizza, and Chuck E. himself.

TBH, though at first, the phrase “Chuck E. Cheese wedding” would have been enough to send us running … the vibes in WBZ’s video of the wedding were absolutely immaculate. Congrats to the happy couple!

— Written by Gia Orsino and Emily Schario

🧀 Thanks for reading! For an $800 wedding, you could do a lot worse. 

🎤 The results are in: 39% of polled B-Siders think Gov. Healey is doing a “great” job. This reader had one note: “Rent control when? We can't let New York win.”

💃 Keep up with us @BostonBSide on IG, TikTok, and Twitter. Send comments and suggestions to [email protected] or [email protected].