Fun for me was going with Daddy on Saturdays to the Lexington Market, a great Baltimore institution, for hand-cut potato chips and a horseradish-spiked crab-cake sandwich, followed by a chocolate Coke at Ludwig's Drug Store.

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And much to my delight, I discovered that I was able to see the city's past as well as its present: the London of my imagination superimposed upon the reality, a transparent city in which the old was encased in the new like an ancient layer cake wrapped in glistening sandwich-wrap.

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