Market Watch -- I have sat down to write this three or four times, and every time I stop, scrap everything and start all over. For many reasons, the most important being that things are changing so fast – every time I finish, the information I have included is inaccurate. More and more restaurants are closing, businesses are changing hours, closing, opening again.

Market Watch -- Do I have a fever? Am I coughing more than normal? My paranoia about potential coronavirus symptoms seems to be quite widespread, judging by my family and friends. After more than one week confined inside the walls of our homes in Spain, our moods have run the whole gamut from joking and laughing in chats and on social media about toilet paper or funny protection outfits to a more intimate anguish and uncertainty.

Holiday Eats -- In Spain, preserving the rituals of Lent – historically a period of 40 days of prayer, penance and pious abstinence from eating meat that leads up to Easter – was up until the second half of the 20th century mostly the responsibility of priests.

Market Watch -- The place smells like a wet dog. The fishmongers have long grown accustomed to it, but the uninitiated are assaulted by the full force of Mercado La Nueva Viga’s funky barnyard smell almost from Eje 6, the congested avenue were we turn into the entrance.

The Sweet Life -- Settling into our first cross-country journey in Turkey many years ago, we were pleasantly surprised by the comforts of Turkish bus travel.

Building Blocks -- The refrigerators are spilling out onto the sidewalk. That’s the first thing we notice at Galaktokomio, a dairy shop in Ambelokipi. We step inside and, unsurprisingly, more of these large refrigerators line one of the walls of this tiny shop.

Street Eats -- Leticia Ochoa walked around Queens’ Corona Plaza, her young son in tow, chatting with each of the food cart vendors clustered around the corner of National and Roosevelt. It was a Sunday morning in February, and the sun was shining. Ochoa works as a community organizer and had helped broker an agreement between the 110 police precinct and the local vendors: If they didn’t block walkways, the police wouldn’t bother them.

Street Eats -- From the leaf-thin fried liver of Edirne to mumbar, the spicy rice-stuffed intestines of eastern Turkey, Turkish cuisine is rich with organ meat delicacies. Sakatat, as offal is called in Turkish, is approached with a fair bit of reverence (and sometimes caution).