Reggie Nadelson, January 10 2009 Lovely, scented Santa Fe where in winter the air smells of pine and cedar. Where ristras of bright red chillies hang over every wall. And where, on top of the adobe buildings, the farolitos – traditionally votive candles in brown paper bags, now plastic bags with electric lights …[Read more]
I.
Icing on gingerbread
Reggie Nadelson, January 10 2009 Lovely, scented Santa Fe where in winter the air smells of pine and cedar. Where ristras of bright red chillies hang over every wall. And where, on top of the adobe buildings, the farolitos – traditionally votive candles in brown paper bags, now plastic bags with electric lights …[Read more] 
A resolute New Yorker falls unapologetically in love with this western town in the middle of nowhere—or rather, nowhere that writer Reggie Nadelson could have ever imagined. In an art gallery in Livingston, Montana, I meet a man who has been attacked by an elk. He's an art dealer, and as he drove through Yellowstone Park, an elk crashed 
Cookies, candy, and cheap shoes are cool reminders of a lost homeland. There are also memorials to its more brutal realities, none more effective than the Stasi Museum, named for East Germany's infamous secret police and housed in the force's former headquarters on Berlin's Normanenstrasse. Spy cameras, including some that were planted in watering 
In the Heart of Mayfair, John Saumarez Smith presides over what many consider the best little book shop in the english-speaking world. "Try that," he says, extracting a book from a messy, tempting pile as if he'd been expecting me, though it's months since I've been in London. "I think you might like it," John Saumarez Smith 
Hermès, which turned basic accessories into modern icons, takes the lid off what's luxe now. Reggie Nadelson reports from 24 Rue Faubourg St.-Honoré. Once upon a time in a suburb of Paris, a guy kissed a bag, though it was no frog and did not really need a kiss. It was at the Hermès workshops in 
In seafood shacks, at gourmet tables, and especially during a stomach-defying live-fish auction, Reggie Nadelson discovers the true—and a new—Hawaii. It's 5 a.m. at Honolulu's fish auction, and I'm eyeballing a quivering Hawaiian opah, a pink and silver moonfish, round and flat as a plate. 
Redesigning your mother's engagement ring is serious business. Reggie Nadelson travels to Gstaad and master jeweler Andrew Grima to get it done right. "Shall I surprise you?" Surprise me! Andrew Grima, a big man with a generous smile, sits behind his desk in his shop in Gstaad and scribbles a design for a diamond ring 
I love ice cream. I mean, I really love it, as much as sex, almost as much as Frank Sinatra, more than Manolos. I'll eat anything sweet and frozen (and have): yogurty vanilla ice cream in Red Square in the dead of winter as Soviet soldiers ate their own; an exquisite prune-and-Armagnac flavor at Berthillon, on Paris's Ile St.-Louis; Vassar Devils (hot fudge and marshmallow sundaes served on brownies) accompanied by many gin