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Laura Lewko

@lauralewko

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Behind me is the gallery tower at Burrard Bridge , built in 1932 to end downtown’s Vancouver BC worst traffic chokehold and open the way to Kitsilano. The steel structure is hidden behind carved stone: a ship’s prow by sculptor Charles Marega juts out above the archway, the city’s coat of arms sits over the entrance, and lamps at either end still burn in tribute to Canadian WWI prisoners of war. Even the old stairwell down to the beach has been closed for decades. We walk through our city every day and know none of its history. 🌉⚓ taken in Vancouver, British Columbia by @lauralewko

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4 days ago

Be yourself! by @lauralewko

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7 days ago

From my tradition to yours, whatever your faith: here is what this day means to me. Tonight begins Yom Kippur. We ask forgiveness, but the prayers only cover what we owe G-d. What we owe each other, no prayer can undo. Only going to that person and making it right. May we be sealed for good. May we have the courage to go to the people we have wronged, and make it right. That part is open to all of us. G’mar chatimah tovah!

Da minha tradição para a sua, qualquer que seja a sua fé: é isso que este dia significa para mim. Hoje à noite começa o Yom Kippur. Pedimos perdão, mas as orações cobrem apenas o que devemos a D-us. O que devemos uns aos outros, nenhuma oração desfaz. Só ir até a pessoa e consertar. Que sejamos selados para o bem. Que tenhamos a coragem de ir até quem magoamos, e consertar. Essa parte está aberta a todos nós. G’mar chatimah tovah! taken in La Sinagoga Del Transito by @lauralewko

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11 days ago

Amazónico, Madrid. Barrio de Salamanca, where the crowd is more local than tourist and the street itself feels quietly upscale. The decor is pure jungle theatre and the wine list is excellent. The food is good rather than extraordinary, though the staff were lovely throughout. Don’t come for the name: despite the pão de queijo on arrival and the picanha off the grill, this is pan-Latin fusion by a Brazilian chef, not Brazilian cooking. Go downstairs to the Jungle Jazz Club. That’s where the night actually lives.

📍 Calle de Jorge Juan, 20, Salamanca, Madrid

#amazonicomadrid #junglejazzclub #barriodesalamanca #madridfoodie #latinfusion taken in Madrid, Spain by @lauralewko

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12 days ago

I was in Córdoba a couple of years ago, in Plaza de Tiberíades, with my hand on the statue of Maimonides the Rambam. You are supposed to touch it for luck. Everybody does.
It is 2026, and somebody has sprayed a swastika across the base of that same statue.

He was born on that street in 1135, when this was the greatest Jewish city on earth , physicians, astronomers and translators, where Jews, Muslims and Christians argued with each other instead of about each other. It was never perfect. It was still the most learned place in Europe.

Then a new power came, as new powers do, and decided the arrangement no longer suited it. In 1148 the Jews of Córdoba were offered conversion, exile or death, and a boy of thirteen walked out of Spain and never came back.
He took Aristotle and the Torah and refused to let them contradict each other. Aquinas read him. Muslim scholars quoted him knowing exactly who he was. He became physician to Saladin’s court in Cairo, and the medical treatises he wrote there were taught in Europe for centuries. Córdoba kept the birthplace. It never got the man.

And he was one of thousands. Across the street, Casa de Sefarad holds the others poets, translators, women who financed whole communities and the map of where they went. It hardly matters where. Every place that took them in rose because of it.

That is what nobody who signs an expulsion order understands, and what whoever held that spray can was never taught. You can take the land, the house, the shop, the synagogue. You cannot take who a person is and who they are is what built the place to begin with. So they build it again somewhere else, and the world keeps the benefit while somebody else keeps the empty square.

Hating costs far more than understanding ever would. Go to Córdoba, see all of it, then stand in that square for a minute and see what a city can lose. taken in Córdoba, Andalucía, España by @lauralewko

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13 days ago

I walked through three empires in one afternoon
The Alhambra isn’t one place. A Jewish vizier named Samuel ha-Nagid a spice merchant who became the man running Granada and commanding its Muslim army built his fortress on this red hill. The Nasrids raised their palaces over him from 1238. Then Charles the Fifth planted a Renaissance palace in the middle of it, that circular courtyard I’m standing in, like a signature on someone else’s painting.

And in 1492 Boabdil handed the keys to Ferdinand and Isabella and rode out. He was given an estate in the mountains, lasted barely a year there, then sold it and sailed for Morocco.
Three faiths, one hill. Every ruler thought they’d be the last one.

Atravessei três impérios numa tarde só e nem troquei de sapato.
A Alhambra não é um lugar só. Antes dos sultões, um vizir judeu chamado Samuel ha-Nagid um comerciante de especiarias que virou o homem que governava Granada e comandava seu exército muçulmano construiu sua fortaleza nesta colina vermelha. Os nasridas ergueram seus palácios por cima a partir de 1238. Depois Carlos Quinto plantou um palácio renascentista bem no meio, aquele pátio circular onde estou, como uma assinatura no quadro de outra pessoa.

E em 1492 Boabdil entregou as chaves a Fernando e Isabel e partiu. Ganhou uma propriedade nas montanhas, durou pouco mais de um ano ali, vendeu tudo e embarcou para o Marrocos.
Três fés, uma colina. Todo governante achou que seria o último. taken in Alambra Granada by @lauralewko

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15 days ago

Churros were childhood for me.

So standing in Granada, at Churrería Alhambra frying since 1933 watching a man pour one unbroken spiral into the oil and cut it in front of me, something turned over in my chest.

Here they don’t call them churros. They call them tejeringos And they’re not Spanish first they’re al-zalābiyya, written down in Baghdad in the 10th century, carried here by the Moors. From this soil it got on ships and crossed the ocean to the new world to a little girl with burnt fingers and a paper bag.

And here’s what gets me: they serve it with thick chocolate. Cacao came back the other way, from the Americas. So the dish crossed the Atlantic twice, in both directions, to become what I ate that morning.

The caliphate in Alhambra fell in 1492. But food doesn’t. It just keeps travelling. taken in Granada, España by @lauralewko

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18 days ago

25 years. I still remember.

I was at university in Brazil when the towers fell. My professor said it was the start of the Third World War. We thought he was exaggerating. Today we see he wasn’t. We are in a war. It’s just fought with completely different weapons.

2,977 people from more than 90 countries died that day. They didn’t just attack America. They attacked the world.

A friend once played me a voice message from his friend, trapped inside the towers, saying goodbye.

Years later I married a man who was in New York that morning. He barely speaks about it. He says it was the eeriest feeling of his life.

Twenty-five years later, I still don’t understand it. Not the politics. The thing itself. How do you invoke the name of God, who is supposed to be righteous, to do evil to thousands of people? And they don’t hide it. They are proud of it. They say it out loud. To me that is the most unspeakable and inexplicable form of evil in the world.

And now I watch that same terror being excused and explained away, as if it were just another point of view. It isn’t. There is no context that makes murdering people something to defend.

Posting this to remember. Because forgetting is how it happens again.

#911 #25Years by @lauralewko

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21 days ago

I almost got this one wrong.
Hungry after the soccer match in Wilrijk, no reservation, we walked into a corner grill backing onto the Beerschot Wilrijk pitches nothing around it but trees. The staff explained the concept at length and I couldn’t follow it. I’ll admit I sat there wondering if I’d walked into a tourist trap.
Then I understood. Starters and dessert are included. The meat is the point. Everything that landed on the table was worth every euro.
And the place itself , the music, the walls covered in framed photographs, all the small details somebody clearly thought about. Look around when you’re there. Then there’s a little game after the meal, which had us all laughing.
The owner is Belgian, married to a Brazilian woman, years spent in Spain before landing here. Two of the warmest people I’ve met.
Nowhere near where tourists go. Which is exactly why you should go.
🇧🇪📍 Den Entrecôte, Doornstraat 203, Wilrijk (Antwerp) taken in Antwerp, Belgium by @lauralewko

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22 days ago

Fable Café, South Granville. Half design shop, half café: ceramics, small things for the home and a cappuccino worth sitting with. The handmade clay cups are what got me. Nobody else has them. Warm, quiet, unhurried. It feels like home.
📍 2871 Granville St, Vancouver
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Fable Café, South Granville. Metade loja de design, metade café: cerâmicas, cores, coisinhas para a casa e um cappuccino que dá vontade de ficar. Os copos de barro feitas à mão foram o que me conquistou. Ninguém mais tem. Aconchegante, tranquilo, sem pressa. Parece casa.
📍 2871 Granville St, Vancouver taken in Vancouver, British Columbia by @lauralewko

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23 days ago

Mr Sheeran ( @teddysphotos ) , Mr Haggerty ( @macklemore
On 4 and 5 September, eighty thousand people who bought tickets to a concert were handed a verdict on the most contested conflict on earth. I challenge you both from a position I earned.
I have been to the Gaza border. I went because I would not speak about a place I had only been shown. If you are so certain go and see it. Then talk.
Until then, answer me. Have you watched the footage the attackers filmed themselves on 7 October?
Have you opened one history book two decades of rockets at civilian towns, the suicide bombings, the choices made by Gaza’s own leadership and what they cost the people living under them? Or is a stadium chant enough?
The charge delivered from that stage as settled fact is one no court has ruled on. I reject it. Serious people dispute it. Nobody in that stadium was given the means to weigh it.
And what does it build? Not a school, not a clinic, not a fund, not one proposal that leaves a single Palestinian better off. A slogan feeds no one, returns no hostage, ends no war. Where is the plan?

Mr Haggerty, you said your message was for peace, and that criticism of Israel is no criticism of Jewish people. Then look at this : Washington: Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, shot dead outside a Jewish museum. Boulder: Karen Diamond, 82, dead of burns from a firebombing at a walk for the hostages. Synagogues firebombed and shot across Canada. I would accept the distinction more readily if the people were not being buried.
Mr Sheeran, you cannot say you were not warned. This is the same performer who once took a stage dressed as an Orthodox Jewish caricature, prosthetic nose included, and apologised for it.
Sheeran, You booked him anyway, and he is still on your bill. Find your voice or give the other side of this history the same stage you gave to one.

Until then, I will not stream your music, attend your shows, or support your work.

#EdSheeran #Macklemore #antissemitismo #7DeOutubro #looptour by @lauralewko

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23 days ago

Okeya Kyujiro, Yaletown. One Michelin star, and Vancouver’s most theatrical omakase. My honest take.

You walk in past a wall of kimonos and lit ceramics, and your imagination runs. I expected a ritual, a threshold. Instead: sit down, instructions, order drinks, show begins.
Wagyu in a cedar box, a whole hamachi, a conger eel raised like a trophy. The fish is superb, the knife work precise. But the food is simple by design. Quality and choreography, not invention.

Two details kept it from complete: the drinks didn’t come at the right temperature, and at this level temperature is craft, not preference. And the service felt distant, in a room where presence is the whole point.

They closed with a small surprise for our special occasion, and it was lovely. The warmth was there. I just wanted more of it, earlier.

📍 1038 Mainland St, Vancouver
#okeyakyujiro #vancouverfoodie #yaletown #omakase michelinvancouver

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Okeya Kyujiro, Yaletown. Uma estrela Michelin e o omakase mais teatral de Vancouver. Minha opinião sincera.

Você entra passando por uma parede de quimonos e cerâmicas iluminadas, e a imaginação dispara. Eu esperava um ritual, uma passagem. Em vez disso: sente-se, instruções, peça as bebidas, o espetáculo começa.

Wagyu numa caixa de cedro, um hamachi inteiro, uma enguia congro erguida como troféu. O peixe é excepcional, o trabalho de faca é preciso. Mas a comida é simples por escolha. Qualidade e coreografia, não invenção.

Dois detalhes me impediram de chamar de completo: as bebidas não vieram na temperatura certa, e nesse nível temperatura é ofício, não preferência. E o serviço pareceu distante, num lugar onde a presença é justamente o ponto.

Fecharam com uma pequena surpresa pela nossa ocasião, e foi encantador. O calor estava ali. Eu só queria mais dele, e mais cedo. Kimonos shelve taken in Vancouver, British Columbia by @lauralewko

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24 days ago