Sunday Hania and I went to the Yellow Green Market, where Colombians were grilling meats out in the parking lot, Trinidadians were selling roti, Mexicans were making tacos, Jamaicans were heating meat patties, Venezuelans were filling arepas, Brazilians were baking cheese bread. There were tiny Thai lunch places and Southern barbecue counters and even a booth advertising “German street food.” Hania spoke Russian with the young man who sold her coconut juice, and on the way out we bought two packages of corn pasta in the Italian Depot.
Back home we turned on the TV and watched a travel show about Swiss trains, and I wondered if I could exchange this ethnic richness for a calm, orderly, efficient country whose president doesn’t have foreign generals killed.
In 1975, Paul Theroux published The Great Railway Bazaar, a book that the New York Times Book Review named one of the Best Books of the Year, along with Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.
A few months ago he published On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – his 48th book, his 18th of travel – and the Book Review gave it a couple of paragraphs in its year-end roundup of travel books, along with 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
I'm not sure if this says more about the fallen prestige of travel writing or the fallen prestige of white men.
Francis Albert Sinatra was born on this day in 1915 in Hoboken, NJ. Half a century later, I heard him on my parents’ stereo over in Phillipsburg. But I didn’t really discover him until 1982, when I was teaching English in Warsaw, Poland.
One of the “language” tapes I used contained half a dozen tracks, each one a scenario comprised of a sequence of various sounds. Students listened to the sounds and then invented a story to go with them.
My favorite featured gently splashing water – a woman taking a bath? – followed by a record of Sinatra singing the opening lines of “All Or Nothing At All.” It was a slow, wistful arrangement that went straight to my heart every time I played it. There was something about hearing that clear, strong, impeccably American voice in an English classroom in the middle of Warsaw that made its yearning brilliance apparent.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have stolen some of the thunder from Taco Tuesday.
(I'm off again - back here on Friday.)
Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had great significance for me, having lived east of it for two and a half years. Also, as a recently-hired travel editor, I knew the thrill of a suddenly opened up world.