After a long-awaited trip comes the inevitable letdown: the lazy or exciting or action-packed days in a foreign city are finished, the cheap and delicious local food long digested (those whole sardines covered in salt grilled on the street, tar-thick rich coffee, tarts piled high with custard, endless flakey pastries…), the few phrases we’ve perfected in Portuguese (or Italian or Spanish) continue to fade until they are forgotten completely. 

How do we make sense of it all? And how do we solidify our experiences so that they don’t fade into barely remembered swathes of color, blurs of beauty, those flashes that make us ask each other: in what city did we taste that unusual sparkling red?