Travel Blog

Last night we drove down to the weekly gathering of food trucks at Young Circle in Hollywood, and because we were in the neighborhood we continued on to World Market. The store sells the best half sour pickles in South Florida, and it transports you - not unlike Little Havana's Dominoes Park - to another place and time.

We walked past the stocky Russian-speakers gathered at the deli counter, the links of colorless sausages, the plastic containers of purplish borscht, the breaded chicken breasts, the Cyrillic notices on the bulletin board, and picked up our upright, pickled cucumbers.

The man in front of us in the checkout line put a bottle of Oyster Stout on the counter. "Is that good beer?" I asked him. "You have to try it yourself," he said in a heavy accent of annoyance. "But have you had it before?" I persisted. "No," he said, and went back to his smartphone.

An older man standing near the entrance caught my eye. He wore rounded brown shoes and a baggy brown double-breasted suit of a faint and unfashionable plaid. His wide tie had swerved to the right, and the knot had dropped down from the open collar of his shirt. His expression suggested an affronted dignity. On his head he wore a white sailor's cap of the kind you see in novelty shops. I could have taken a picture of him and labeled it: "Leningrad, 1981."