Travel Blog

Saturday afternoon Hania and I got in the car and headed up A1A. The crowds of young people on Fort Lauderdale Beach made it look like Spring Break. (Male students - if that's what they were - are a lot more buff today than they were when I was in college.)

In Delray Beach we crossed the Intracoastal to get to the Asian festival on Old Schoolhouse Square. Most of the food and merchandise was from the subcontinent (the festival was sponsored by the local Bangladeshi association), as were most of the attendees, many of them - especially the young women - dressed in colorful salwar kameez - or sometimes saris. The colors, in the late afternoon sun, were incandescent. We passed a booth for Biswas Builders, a perfect name I thought, remembering one of my favorite novels, V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas.

In the food court we found a vegetarian tent and ordered a dosa, the delicious lentil crepe with curried potato filling that came with a cup of spicy soup and a sauce of coconut and chick pea. (If my mother had cooked vegetables like this, I would have eaten them.) After the dosa was gone, we moved to another booth and bought a dish of black chick peas mixed with potato and strands of what resembled kale. For dessert we found some Bangladeshi sweets and got a crepe made of milk and rice flour wrapped around a kind of caramel filling. We stood eating this next to two young women, in salwar kameez, enjoying slices of geen mango sprinkled with red pepper flakes. I had to keep reminding myself that I was in Delray Beach.

Taking seats under the tent, we watched a performance of music and dances from Hawaii, Tahiti and Samoa. This was followed by a troupe of young Chinese acrobats who kept putting their heads between their legs and climbing atop each other in contorted towers.

We left before sunset, got on 95, and drove to Hollywood Beach. The Red, White, and Bluegrass Festival was winding down for the night, but we caught the last few numbers of the Dan Tyminski Band at the bandshell. Then we strolled the Broadwalk, past stands of funnel cakes, corn on the cob, barbecue pork (a pig sitting half-gutted on the counter). Hania bought a wad of cotton candy (it was too windy for a stick, so the man put it in a bag) while I tasted a free sample of poutine, the Quebecoise specialty of French fries, cheese curds and gravy. (I liked the way each individual fry came with its own toothpicked curd and dollop of gravy.)

We strolled arm-in-arm past crowds that were not as colorful as those at the Asian festival but equally content. "Do you have a permit to walk like that?" a wisecracking vendor asked us as the moon, one night past full, rose in muted orange over a placid ocean.