(Day xii)

I am glazing sugar skulls with chocolate and Raul is cooking chiles down into mole. Lisa has come with tequila and is salting rims on four glasses. The room is filled with chicha music and interspersed laughter. Megan wets her hands and chops onions and cilantro, clumping them in growing mounds of green and white.

Few of us have anything to do with the Day of the Dead and neither does Baltimore, nor chicha. However, it's early November and Raul had the idea for a theme party for my visit. I think mostly he wanted to try out his mother's recipe for mole. Well, so did I.

From a woman on a street in Upper Fells Point we procured a bag full of tamales. In a few hours, twenty people will come, trickling in bearing guacamole and beans, rice and plantains, and more tequila.

The smell of chocolate fills the room. We drink sweet from salty rims, and the chicha whistles while we work. Megan is crying, but it's only the onions.

(Day xi)

Tonight there will be a dinner party. Raul requests my help with the seating arrangement. There will be 24 guests including us. The guests are roughly of five types:

1. Smokey, slightly hot. Comfortably sociable.

2. Sweet. Often prefer to be alone, need more persuading to mix.

3. Fiery, sometimes controversial.

4. Very sweet and occasionally colorful.

5. Sweet and relatively predictable.

We decide:

1. One or more per table.

2. One and only one per table.

3. No more than one per table.

4. At least one per table.

5. At least one per table.

Table

A- 2 3 4 5

B- 4 2 1 5

C- 3 1 2 4

D- 1 3 2 5

E- 2 3 1 4

F- 5 4 3 5

(Day x)

Michael Phelps was on the wall with more medals than we had pancakes. If you counted also the sausage links, coffees, and orange juices, we had more things than Michael Phelps had medals. But who's counting.

The place had bag hooks under the bar. The woman sitting next to us had hung her bag from the hook, as had we. Her bag was a brand name logo bag, and she also had a brand name logo wallet, the former tan, the latter pink. She had a friend to eat with and a friend to talk on the phone with, but she had fewer pancakes than we had, and no sausage links. To the right of her were two youngish men. They had heaping plates of food and sparse conversation. They had a beard and a baseball cap between them. They had no bags, but maybe they had wallets. They may not have noticed the hooks.

When my friend and I had finished our marathon brunch, we took our old gossip and new eavesdropping elsewhere. There were many places to be in Baltimore, and people were waiting.

Seven Days in Baltimore (Day ix)

Baltimore is, among other things, a city of row houses. My friend, who was living there at the time and had grown up nearby, said some rows were more dangerous than others. I often found it hard to tell the difference, but she knew, block by block.

Some of the row houses were near the water. Although the people living near the water seemed neither to be fisherman nor port workers, real estate prices of waterfront property were high. People wanted to live close to the water for other reasons, it seemed.

People also wanted to eat there, and drink there. On a sunny afternoon such as this, you didn't mind if you were among rows and rows of people, drinking a beer or glass of wine and looking out at the parked boats. While I am not sure why, I felt the parked boats to be more attractive than the parked cars.

Like the houses (and the people and the cars), they were in rows.

(Day 7)

Marielle and I are sitting on a bench in a fashionable part of Barcelona. Our trip is on the verge of coming to an end, and we have that feeling, the wanting-to-see-everything-while-it's-still-near feeling. We are sitting on a bench with our guidebook, planning for everything that remains to be seen. It is around eight thirty am, and we have been here for a few minutes.

Marielle is eating a ham and cheese sandwich, and we are both drinking cortos. Someone is playing opera. We can hear it in the distance, softly at first. The voice announces that her mother is dead. She was killed at night. The woman recounts how she found the house of her birth burning. With her mother dead, the woman was completely alone and felt that she was surrounded by nothingness.

As the music builds in passion and volume, we find the window. It is stained glass and sun lit. When the woman's story ends, we have finished our cortos but not the planning. Marielle looks at me without saying anything. I say, "shall we?" Without a plan, we start walking.

(Day 6)

Wei is the kind of woman who is significantly more striking in person. She has quick eyes and high cheekbones that lengthen as she speaks. You would know she is petite even in photographs, but the extent of this cannot be understood until you have other things nearby to put Wei in perspective.

Wei's passion is tai chi, even though she left Beijing for Barcelona when she was eight. Still, somehow, something of the old country remains. Wei says she is not sure why but tai chi is starting to become de moda in Barcelona these days. She can not complain, she says.

Still, Wei works as a waitress. I meet her at a hotel bar with Andrea and Marielle. We see her first as a stylish woman behind a large tray of martinis. We strike up a conversation with her, first about olives. Later, she gives us a card and tells us about her other life.

(Day 5)

I was fond of offering to take photos of couples or pairs of friends. I never like to have my photo taken, but it seemed most people enjoy some documentation of the people with whom they'd traveled or the place to which they'd been. When they got back home presumably they would want to convince friends and family that they had traveled with their friend, lover, sister, brother, that they had really been to such-and-such a place. What better way than a photo? they must think, I thought. While I was not sure I understood them correctly, I was fond of offering to help them.

Mike and Charline were a couple from Arkansas, I later found out. They had been together for three years and were traveling to Barcelona, Paris, and London and had just begun their trip. I took a few takes of a photo of them in Parc Guell and only later found out that I rather disliked them (Charline had a high pitched voice and kept fixing her hair; Mike barely spoke a word and couldn't seem to smile).

I thought how I liked that mosaic but only from far away. Still, I was fond of offering to take photos.