4th Avenue, Tucson. March, 2011

Tucson has always been the most inked city I’ve ever visited. But this time I even saw a car that had been tattooed. This sporty number was stopped at a red light on a warm evening along the Saturday night place to be, 4th Avenue. We’d just come from some gallery openings and a pizza dinner at the packed Brooklyn Pizza Company when this eye-popping vehicle materialized. And as the driver was clearly enjoying the attention he was getting from the crowd, he took his time moving on when the light turned green, earning him some honking from envious motorists behind him and cheers from young enthusiasts on the avenida, many of them abundantly inked themselves.

Piraeus, Greece. October, 2011

Where in the world are we? One thing (just the first) that was initially confusing upon docking in Piraeus was our having to rely on signage not only in a different language but in a different alphabet. Our ship pulled in here to the port that has served Athens since antiquity early in the morning, midway through our Istanbul-Rome cruise. And we’d planned to hop the metro into Athens 15 minutes away, climb to the Acropolis, work our way downhill through the Plaka, see the market, buy some gyros, some yogurt, then head back to the boat. And that’s exactly what we did, alphabet notwithstanding. Nice to visit this bustling city with no luggage in tow, no hotel room to find. And nice to collapse in our stateroom upon our return.

Cambridge, MA. Winter, 1982

OK, since you asked. Here are the snows of yesteryear. Or at least one of them. A count-your-blessings tribute to 2012’s “winter that wasn’t.” Unlike a year ago, when our Watertown yard looked pretty much as our old Cambridge one did here 30 years back. Winter 2011 was brutal and relentless, not good for runners like me. Also not good for drivers (not like me.) It sure did make one long to be anywhere but here. Preferably someplace sunny, warm, with good food and a language other than English? Maybe that’s why we were un poco envious of happy for our friends David and George who enjoyed a Costa Rican cruise. Or why we’re thinking that it’s about time for us to plan our next vacation. Sailing from Venice to Barcelona? With maybe a little Croatia and Sicily en route? No snowshovels needed.

Paris. New Year's Eve, 2005

I love Paris. The first time I visited was in 1969, the summer after my junior year in college. My French was minimal, limited to textbook conversations from school and the libretto to Bizet’s Carmen. I checked into the Grand Hotel des Balcons near Place de l’Odeon (it was cheap in those days) and had a great time, drinking red wine, eating French fries and couscous and I can’t remember what else. Visiting again three years later, my friend Robert and I checked into another cheap hotel nearby and used Paris as the base for our day trips to Reims, Fontainebleau, Dijon and other nearby cities. Some 33 years passed before I visited again, this time during Christmas week with Nick, ostensibly to attend a New Year’s Eve party given by Dorie and her husband. As you can tell from this photo (snapped on the unseasonably warm last day of December, even though it had snowed the day before), I love Paris. Every moment of the year.

Watertown, MA. May, 2011

Meet Ahmad, proprietor of Yasin Culinary, the catering business at which he also teaches occasional classes in Syrian-Arabic cooking. Ahmad grew up on a farm in Syria, so he knows the value and importance of fresh, home-grown ingredients. (He also ran a revered restaurant near my home for years that attracted notables from the food world long before the word “foodie” regrettably entered the lexicon. Because he’s a neighbor, I often see him working his sizable vegetable garden, coaxing his plants to forget that New England has a pitifully limited growing season.) The night that I took my first class with him, we made the dish you see him preparing here: Rummaniyya, a main course of chicken in a pomegranate sauce. The sweetness of honey, the tartness of pomegranate molasses, the bite of hot pepper and garlic, the warmth of cumin, all of these combine with tomatoes and mint to achieve the balance of flavors that distinguishes the cooking he grew up with. When the class was over and we’d finished eating what we’d made, there wasn’t a spoonful left on the platter.

Ávila, Spain. October, 2009

When you’ve got a good thing going, run with it. In this case, the town of Ávila and its most famous resident, Santa Teresa. She is a major tourist draw to this beautiful walled city, and so it’s no surprise that her name appears everywhere. Farmacia Santa Teresa. Café Santa Teresa. Hotel Santa Teresa. Even the gazpacho at this small restaurant. On our brief visit to Ávila, we sought out the famed sweets called yemas. Made from, it seems, egg yolks and sugar and little else (a few grains of cinnamon, a drop of lemon juice), they were not entirely to my liking and so I was glad that the saleslady had offered me a sample, saving me from having to buy an entire box. The name of the store? Yemas de Santa Teresa, of course.

Rome. October, 1980

I have written here before about my first trip to Italy with my friend Dali. And about her way of taking photos of other people by posing near them and acting as if we weren’t even aware of their presence. We’d maneuvered photos this way at the Rome Zoo, in the Piazza Navona, all over Italy, in fact. This is one of my favorites. She had seen these three Sicilian men visiting the Forum in Rome and immediately went and posed extravagantly in front of them. I was so used to her hijinks at this point that I didn’t even need to ask, I just pointed my camera and shot. Can’t you feel her sense of naughty and joyous satisfaction?