Best way to visit another country for $1

The most common complaint you hear about Boston is that it's too small, too provincial, too boring. However, if people would do a little less whining and a little more exploring, they'd discover that this town has a lot more diversity than immediately meets the eye. Get off the Red Line at Ashmont, for instance, and you'll feel like you're not only in a different town, but a different country, maybe even a different era. First, you see an array of little carts, right there in the station, selling everything from pocketbooks to kumquats. Nearby are the trolley cars that go to Mattapan. Orange in color and bearing a logo that appears nowhere else on the T, these old, wonderfully preserved trams seem like something you'd climb aboard in Cuba. The first leg of the trip -- which takes about 15 minutes -- is a roller-coaster trundle up and around an embankment. The trolley then travels beneath a canopy of trees, past marshes, canals, and red-brick warehouses. A half-hour from Park Street, you enter stations with names like Valley Road and look out onto a landscape that's as unfamiliar to most of us as the streets of Budapest. Back at Ashmont, you can wander up Dorchester Avenue to Peabody Square and visit All Saints -- a small church built in 1892 that calls to mind something you'd see in a French village. Of course, the Tara Pub across the road -- a "Men and Ladies Bar" -- has Boston written all over it, but what do you expect for a buck?

MBTA, (617) 222-3200; www.mbta.com.