A Moment of Happiness

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

-George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

I really do not understand the purpose of dessert without chocolate.

Cakes, cookies, puddings, etc that do not contain chocolate confuse me because I cannot wrap my mind around the point of their existence. That may just be my view as a chocolate-enthusiast, and while I am obviously very biased, I do also have a pretty decent palate for pastries. Baltimore, believe it or not, has quite a few bakeries that can provide your sweet/pastry/indulgent tooth with something to satisfy it. This list would make Marie Antoinette proud, I am sure of it.

Fenwick Bakery (North Harford Road)

This bakery finds it origins in a love story. A young couple began it in 1913 and since then, generations of the same family (until very recently when it acquired new owners) have maintained the amazing quality of baked goods that they sell. Seriously, their goods are amazing. They are one of the few scratch bakeries left in Baltimore and it shows. If you go to this bakery, you have to try their Baltimore Peach Cake. And their pastries. And their doughnuts.

Bonjour (Mount Washington)

I am a firm believer that nobody outside of the French borders (or really outside of Paris or Lyon) should attempt to make macarons, it just ends up badly with dry cookies and sticky paste. Just leave it to the professionals. But Bonjour’s macarons make me give up on that elitist world view (albeit temporarily). Their baguettes, croissants, napoleons and brioches are also to die for. This bakery will just make you feel like you’re in the 7e arrondissement in Paris. And who doesn’t want to be there?

Patisserie Poupon (Inner Harbor)

If you can bake a pear tarte in the shape of a pear, that is an art form I can 100% support. This bakery is well-known in Baltimore for its scrumptious and gorgeous wedding cakes, but since I have only ever seen them I can’t comment on how delicious they are. Their pastries, however, I have had. Many times. This bakery actually is one of the few where I will break my chocolate-only rule, their Spanish fruit cake is so Mediterranean (and therefore perfect) that it will give you such a moment of happiness.

Dangerously Delicious Pies (Federal Hill)

Rodney Henry’s Dangerously Delicious Pies is a multi-store operation that will convert somebody who is lukewarm about pies (i.e. me) into a pie enthusiast. Pecan filling with chocolate glaze happens to be my favorite. Just the typing it out makes me want to grab a slice. They have the usual lemon, apple, blueberry, etc pies but also chicken and lamb pies that be a meal. I promise you, even if you try one of their pies, it will make you a pie enthusiast.

Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop (Little Italy)

Any list of bakeries in Baltimore would be incomplete without a shout out to Vaccaro’s. While I am sure their bigger-is-better philosophy would confuse actual Italians, in Charm City we appreciate the aesthetics of cannoli that is as big as our head. They have Monday night specials of all-you-can-eat-desserts, and their biscotti and cream puffs are fabulous. Also their gelato, while it isn’t a baked good, is pretty darn good. They have their exalted reputation with Hopkins students for a reason, so make sure sometime during your time in Baltimore to indulge in their goods.

Ultimately, I know there are probably dozens of bakeries in this city I have not had the pleasure of exploring but these fives rank amongst my favorites. So if you haven’t had the opportunity yet, go on and indulge a little.

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By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self-satisfaction.

-William Osler

Earlier this week, a friend of mine and one of the organizers at the Tutorial Project, Hannah invited me to come to a Baltimore City school initiative. The meeting consisted of parents, teachers, social workers, and community organizers discussing the various campaigns being worked on to address the immediate needs of the BCPS system. The topic of this particular meeting was the bottle tax and property tax initiative that will help raise money in order to ameliorate the issue of crumbing and decrepit infrastructure that is a reality for the majority of schools in Baltimore City. As individuals who spend much of our time working with and for Baltimore youth, Hannah and I were moved by the dedication and passion of those at the meeting. There was a sense of objective understanding that our involvement, despite our desire to be a part of the work and movement, would be that of outsiders. Whether that was a manifestation of our own making or because seeing Hopkins students at these kinds of meeting is such an anomaly is a distinction that is up for interpretation, but it did spark a thought in my mind concerning how Hopkins students interact within our community.

Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus can feel like an oasis of higher education in a sea of poverty. Baltimore City is not a exceedingly wealthy city, there are parts of the city where graduation rates are lower than you would conceive to be possible, and it struggles to deal with a economy that has not been allowed it to recover from a decline in industry. With all of that said, Baltimore City still stands as a testament to its citizens and its reputation as charm city. To spend four years here, or any city for that matter, and remain apathetic towards is plights is to do a disservice to the opportunities offered by the college experience.  Sitting in lecture, learning how to think, articulate, argue and fail are all important to the classroom education in college; however, I believe there are more fundamental lessons that are learned through the independence and immersion into a new community.

That community extends beyond the walkways and lecture halls of a college campus. I know this because I see it every day. I see it in the interactions between our tutors and tutees at the Tutorial project, between families that come to Kennedy Krieger to participate in research and the volunteers, between freshmen during Orientation and the areas they serve during the President’s Day of Service. I have seen in countless times during my four years at Hopkins, but I have never been able to articulate why I find it so particularly important. For the first time, this meeting allowed me the vocabulary to discuss why college students must, on the merit of necessity, be engrained and concerned about the triumphs and tribulations of their adopted city.

My family came to this country for the sole purpose of offering my sisters and myself the opportunity for an amazing education; moreover, I recognize the importance of the schooling part of education. To learn and to expand and to grow, it is all dandy and important. But, almost more consequentially, education should allow you to grow as a whole human. To expand your capability for compassion and involvement. You can gain all the skills in the world, but without the values and experience to apply them they remain stagnant and benefiting nobody. I may not remember how to solve a gravitational potential problem in ten years, but I will value the ability to integrate and contribute to issues that affect my community, wherever that may be.

So it matters to me. It matters that elementary schools in Baltimore do not have heating in the winter, that their walls are crumbling and that their funding is lacking. That is the particular issue that evokes my passions, it may not be the same for everybody, but something (ambiguity intended) should be important enough for you to care. Apathy is limiting, frustrating and fruitless. Caring about BCPS is not included in my curriculum to graduate, but it bears just as much importance to my education. Because this is now my home as well, and to remain disengaged would be an insult to the warmth, opportunities and wealth of support that this city has offered me. That is a lesson that should be taken by all college students, future and present, because the choices we make now about the value we place on issues we care about will be long-lasting and run very deep.

Posted in Baltimore, Beyond Baltimore, Social Action | Share This

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

-Elizabeth Bowen

When my friend Adam told me that he had never officially ventured to the Baltimore Museum of Art which resides directly adjacent/for all intensive purposes on the Hopkins campus, I basically wept internally to myself and sat next to Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen for a bit till I felt better. With most people who tell me things that break my heart a little (“football is boring,” “I don’t read for fun,” “I’ve never seen Lord of the Rings,” “chocolate is not my favorite thing in the world,” “you can’t be African, you’re pale!” etc), I basically just pretend that it never happened, denial is not just a river in Egypt and all that, but with this – I literally was like “we need to fix this right now.” Mainly because if I like you enough as a friend, I like to share things that I enjoy (duh!) and in return, I love it when my friends challenge my experiences and perceptions. For example, I now no longer have a rudimentary stereotypical perception of Wisconsin. I actually think it is an interesting state. Also it’s state drink is milk – go figure. It also has a city that has the most outdoor public sculpture per capita of any city in North American. Things I learned from Adam while on D level during finals. The more you know, the further you go people – Reading Rainbow wasn’t lying to us.

I'm such a sucker for marble sculptures. They are never short of magnificent.

Anyway, I actually have a point to this rambling. So we went in the midst of finals as a form of a mental break, and I art-nerded and Adam dealt with me, like only my friends know how to. My complete devotion to museums, and art museums specifically, is something that I simultaneously thank and blame my mother for entirely. When we first came to this country, my mother used to take my older sister and I to museums all the time. I grew up playing in Rotunda in the National Art Gallery, challenging my sisters to name artists in the each gallery, the butterfly enclave in the National Museum of Natural History still remains one of my favorite places on Earth. But as I got older, I had to come to the realization that that experience was something that was gifted to me by where I grew up, who my parents were and what values they passed onto me. I made friends from parts of the country that did not have museums easily accessible to them and thus had a different appreciation for aspects of it that I had taken for granted.

I am going to make every one of my friends come to see the butterflies with me before I graduate. No joke.

I actually think I was getting complacent in my trips to the BMA. I would usually make a bee-line for the impressionist gallery and/or the inner courtyard and just sit and think, read, write etc. I guess with most things, familiarity leads to a decrease in appreciation. A fresh perspective usually is enough to jolt me back to recognition of treasuring everything that I am allowed to be a part of. The BMA trip was just one example. After three and a half years at Hopkins, I only occasionally take a moment to stop and marvel at aspects of this university and my experience that are commonplace to me.  The campus on an exceptionally beautiful October day, the psychedelic walls in the Tutorial office, the to-die-for truffle based drinks at Chocolatea, the stacks on D level with literature that makes me want to give up on school and just read for a living, and more than anything else – the people that I have shared even a fraction of my time here with. It is actually quite annoying how emotional I get over the fact that the sand in the hourglass of my time here is moving much more briskly than I am comfortable with. And so the point of my tale is, whether it is by inviting a friend to visit a museum that you adore or by taking a moment every time you do something that is regularly in your routine – it is worth it to remind yourself to take a breath, enjoy the moment and appreciate the little joys that often pepper our lives subconsciously.

Seriously. Chocolatea is sinfully good. photo from http://www.chocolateacafe.com/

Happy Holidays and New Year Everyone! Whatever you may celebrate (or nothing at all) – enjoy the food, family and days off of work!

Posted in Baltimore, Reflection | Share This

Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.

-Yoko Ono

Spring in Baltimore is something that truly adds to the charm of being a student at Hopkins. There is the smell of spring in the air, that unexplainable sensation of the earth coming alive after a long and harsh winter. It is a season of firsts: the first flowers to bloom, the trees coming alive, seeing the birds, and Hopkins’ notorious squirrels and rabbits be bionically-active again.

Those from the mid-Atlantic are familiar with the process, the flowers sprouting, the bushes and trees being pruned, and the lovely scent of manure in the air. The spring in this region is something to behold, it is almost as if Mother Nature is rewarding those who have to suffer through winter weather. And after the winter we had, the joy of seeing flowers around campus is just a bit sweeter this year.

Weather is Baltimore can be either a selling point for potential Hopkins students, or an obstacle to overcome. The latter is an attitude usually offered by those coming from areas that have one season and amazing weather year-round. I happen to enjoy the entire range of seasons offered in the mid-Atlantic.

Our winter is an actual winter, where the act of huddling up with friends at a café for hot chocolate is an interaction that is necessitated by the January cold. The blizzards we had this past winter are a complete anomaly, which I can say out of personal experience, living in the area for nearly the entirety of my life and never experiencing that level of blizzard before.

Spring in Baltimore, as I’ve mentioned, is glorious. Especially at Hopkins, where students come out in packs to enjoy the beautiful weather on the Beach, the quads and anywhere else we can sit outside to feel the sunshine. Seeing the campus getting green again is not good for staying academically focused, but it is beautiful. We do, like everywhere else in the world, get rain. Especially during March and April, but the saying “April showers bring May flowers” isn’t for naught, and the end result of those showers is more than worth dealing with some drizzling.

I have never actually spent an entire summer in Baltimore, but I have spent a few weekends up here and DC weather is essentially identical so know that when I say summer in the mid-Atlantic is humid but insanely pretty I’m telling the truth. The Homewood campus, especially, is gloriously lush and green. I remember seeing the campus for the first time with my family in July, and they were in awe that I would get to go to school on such a beautiful campus.

And autumn, being my absolute favorite season, is saved for last. I love the fall in Baltimore because it is always just the right temperature. It is perfect for lunches outside and still wearing sweaters. Autumn has always had such a collegiately association in my subconscious, which is probably why I always like the Fall semester more than the Spring.

Essentially, if you spend an entire year in Baltimore you will enjoy the best of the season that is your personal favorite, and also get to experience some other fantastic types of weather as well.

As an aside: JHU_Greco is an amazing photographer, and he has taken many shots of the campus over his freshmen year. His personal blog contains much of them, I would highly recommend you head over there to behold the Homewood campus in all its glory.

Blizzard photos credited to Wilk Kirk Photography.

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