Day 24: I triple-dog-dare you to drink that.

I'm Adam Sell and I have two months left before I leave Boston. My challenge? Do something in the city every day. Have ideas for my adventure? Send me an email.

For the longest time, Chinatown was nothing more than a stop on the Orange Line to me. It was sandwiched in there, right between Downtown Crossing and New England Medical Center (are we supposed to call it Tufts Medical now?), and was just one more dot to pass on the way to something else.

Well, today, I set out to change that. My brother and I went off in search of foods we hadn't tried, which we would then dare each other to consume.

I was the first guinea pig. We stopped at a bakery on a street corner near the big Chinatown gate, and I picked out a "melon cake." Hey, it was 80 cents, I thought, what the heck. I learned something on the very first bite: pastries from Chinatown and pastries from the North End are very, very different things. For example, there was roughly no sugar in the Chinatown pastry. My brother was having none of it. Nor would he try the bubble tea. What a wimp.

We then struck a deal. I wouldn't call him a wimp in this entry if he would sample two foods of my choosing from the Super 88 down the street. My first choice was a flavor of ramen noodles neither of us had encountered before, but that turned out to be just shrimp. So with everything on the line, I spied something in the beverage aisle that was like a beacon, calling to me:

A drink, made of the same stuff we rub on sunburns. And it had things floating in it. My brother eyed it with apprehension, but he promised, and I was holding him to it. I did decide to let him take it home first, so he could at least be near his bed if the aloe vera didn't agree with him. On the drive home, we munched on fruit snacks that the package likened to the cheeks of children who live in cold climates. I love translations.

But the aloe vera drink was anticlimactic. As he reported and I confirmed, it didn't really taste like anything, although the floating stuff was a strange texture. So we ended our taste test even, and I won't call him a wimp. Shucks.