Travel Blog

Dinner at Doggi's Venezuelan Cuisine. It was an intimate, dimly lit restaurant with whimsical art work on the walls, an extremely friendly staff, a soccer match playing on a very large screen, and Beatles music wafting out of speakers. "This place is great," the young man at the table next to me said to his friend who was wearing scrubs as "Penny Lane" played, "this is my favorite Beatles song."

My shredded beef and white cheese arepa arrived in a black-and-white checkered paper sleeve. As I ate, large portions of meat fell out of the pocket onto my plate, where I used them to mop up the two puddles I'd made of hot sauce and green sauce. A man entered, told the waitress he was going to take out, and asked if he could sit and have a glass of wine while waiting. She happily led him to the table at my other side.

Well-fed, I headed down Coral Way to Books & Books where Mitchell Kaplan told me about the new Books & Books opening in a few weeks in Key West. Then Eric Weiner spoke to a packed room about his new book, The Geography of Genius, in which he travels to places - Athens, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Florence, Silicon Valley, etc. - that produced, or are producing, geniuses. The discussion was deftly led by Eric's old friend and NPR colleague Ilene Prusher, and enlived by numerous questions from the audience. Mitchell asked Eric - who had written part of his first book, The Geography of Bliss, in the Books & Books cafe - what role intelligence played in genius. A high IQ, answered Eric, is not necessarily an indicator of genius. "Geniuses are not know-it-alls," he said, "they're see-it-alls" - meaning they're people who are able to make connections.

After the talk I ordered a beer at the bar in the courtyard and got talking to a man who had left Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan, and a woman who had left Cuba, studied in Paris, and spent her career at the U.N. The night air had the hint of a chill - I had put on a light sweater - and the courtyard cafe of a South Florida bookstore, which I had sat in countless times, suddenly seemed like an ingenious idea.