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?

Worcester, MA. March, 2011

Welcome to the land that time forgot. The real reason I made a pilgrimage to Water Street in Worcester was to see the “surreal icons” of artist Scott Holloway on exhibit at the Secret Society tattoo parlor in this funky neighborhood. (And they were great, all anatomical parts shown reverently against fields of gold leaf, displaying the artist’s interest in the dogma, science and painterly craft that all surfaced during the early Renaissance.) But the real find may have been the neighborhood itself, a neglected piece of the past, retaining vestiges of its history as the early home of Worcester’s Polish and Jewish enclaves. Not much left, alas, but what there is delights. Weintraub’s Deli on one side, Widoff’s Bakery on the other. The venerable throwback Broadway Diner and Bay State (Lebanese) bakery just down the block. Before I met my friend (and local resident) Patty for coffee at the Broadway, I had already purchased both bread pudding and a cinnamon/raisin babka from Widoff’s, reluctantly taking a raincheck on the heavily powdered-sugared chruschiki (the “angel wings” cookies I hadn’t seen since the Polish mother of a high school friend had introduced them to me some 45 years earlier.)

Centro Habana, Cuba. February, 2012

Meet my new friend Hanoi. (Yes, como el Vietnam, as he clarified for me.) I was introduced to him one evening, and when he asked if I was interested in folk art, we were off and running. What a golden opportunity. He guided me through after-dark neighborhoods I never would have entered on my own, showing me murals and shrines in some pretty dicey places. Like this one in Central Havana’s Callejón de Hamel, fine by daylight, much less so at night. Hanoi is a babalao, a diviner, a priest of the highest rank in Santería (itself a heady blend of bits of Roman Catholicism and African Yoruba religions, somewhat akin to Haiti’s voodoo.) So he not only showed me some insider’s hotspots, he also provided me with ample protection both physical and spiritual. We wound up at Coppelia, Havana’s fabled ice cream emporium, where we each had two small cones of rizado chocolate (mixed vanilla and chocolate.) Heaven.

Vatican City. October, 2011

We took the metro early one Sunday morning to the Vatican so that Jay could see the magnificence that is St. Peter’s Basilica. As we passed mile-long lines of people waiting to get into the Vatican Museums, and even several hundred in queue just to enter the church itself, we saw smoke, heard music. And there, coming up the main street, was a Señor de los Milagros procession by Peruvian members of a Spanish-language church in Rome. Ladies in mantillas, walking backwards, systematically dispensing clouds of incense. Then honor guards bearing banners embroidered with images of Christ on one side, his mother the BVM on the other. (You can just make out the Blessed Virgen on the back of the main banner there.) Then this marching band, which, for trumper-player Jay, was more thrilling than any dome, colonnade or baldacchino could ever be. Wonderful surprises at every turn here in the Eternal Città.