On the streets of Havana, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker carried Ernest Hemingway to the long bar at the Floridita for daiquiris mixed strong and sour. It took him to the hilltop farmhouse where he lived most of the last twenty-two years of his life. Then it disappeared. (more…)
Our teenage boys lacked patience for the Louvre, so we made the streets of Paris our museum. (more…)
On my way to Sonjoji temple, I sit on the Tokyo subway with dour-faced salarymen.
To reach the forest temples of Nikku, I hurtle 200 miles an hour across Honshu.
Click by click, a cog railway bears me to sacred Koya-San amid its mandala of mountains.
In search of ancient Japan — its Zen temples, manicured gardens and Buddhist priests muttering prayers in black robes — I find myself on trains. (more…)
Beneath the resorts that line the Yucatan, underground rivers run through ancient coral bedrock, making for mellow water adventures. Scuba divers risk getting trapped in these cenotes(sinkholes formed by collapsed rock), but for snorkelers, who can’t penetrate as deeply, only a fool would come face-to-face with death in them.
I am that fool. (more…)
As he leads a painted horse cart brimming with oranges and bananas and peaches past housing projects and boarded-up buildings, B.J. looks like the king of West Baltimore. Friends shout his name, grasp his hand, lean over to share hugs. He greets, chats, and moves on, calling out his wares in the grimmest part of town, through streets strewn with garbage and smelling of urine.
“Yeah, pretty red tomato, tomatoooo. Yeah, watermelon, watermelon, watermelon.”
The syllables melt into a tune that, to the uninitiated, might sound like nonsense.
“Wat-oh, wat-oh, wat-oh, oh-oh…”
It sounds like a voice from the past as it echoes off brick and formstone walls, and many Baltimoreans fear that it will be. B.J. may be the end of a nearly 150-year-old lineage. The last of the arabbers.
Go to the story on Eater.com.
The boys were raised in little wooden houses with palm frond roofs, some of them, and floors of dirt or concrete, lit by oil lanterns. The electric lights that glittered on the sequins of nightclub dancers in Havana didn’t reach the poor here, eight miles to the southeast, in the village of San Francisco de Paula.
Old men now, in their eighties, they look back on a time 75 years ago when a legend even while he lived enchanted their childhood (more…)
I’m a freelance journalist based near Washington, D.C., where I specialize in writing about food, the environment and travel writing from a shrinking globe. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to contact me at david@davidmfrey.com.