ON a recent Thursday evening, Brixton Market in South London was a study in odd juxtapositions. The daily cacophony of vendors hawking everything from Jamaican plantains to knockoff handbags was clearing out. Meanwhile, a man in a cow suit handed work sheets to a group of sophisticates clutching glasses of red wine, participants in an organized scavenger hunt meant to encourage community Read more
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A Dining Explosion in a Tiny Basque Town
TRY to imagine the gustatory experience of running up a mountain. Drawing a blank? An avant-garde dish called Juego de Verdura claims to be just that. On a small plate there are two short glasses, one spewing cloudlike vapor and the other containing layers of egg, mushroom, vegetable soup and spinach-tinged foam. Strangely delicious, it also makes sense: Envision jogging upward past hens Read more
Four Corners, Two Wheels
WE had awakened before dawn to get a jump on the desert heat and rolled out under a headlight moon, pedaling fast in the cool morning of the Dolores River Canyon. There were no cars, not out here. There was only the sound of bike tires on asphalt, the river’s murmur, the cascading song of a canyon wren and that beginning-of-the-world smell of river mud in the blue morning. Horses nuzzled the Read more
In Britain, Dorms Have Summer Jobs
WHEN I walked into Victoria Hall at Oxford University’s Keble College last month, I was sure I had entered a far more genuine Hogwarts experience than anything Universal could have created at the new Harry Potter theme park in Orlando. Before me was a Gothic dining hall nearly the length of a football field, filled with long wooden tables illuminated by reading lamps. From the cathedral-high Read more