Author: zora

Hey, Ladies! What to Wear in the Middle East

Last week, my esteemed colleague Celeste Brash published her Top 5 clothing picks for women traveling to hot, conservative countries.

It’s a great list, but in the heart of the Middle East, you’re dealing with dry heat and more-conservative modesty norms. So I thought I’d share what I usually pack for a Middle East trip. Let’s begin with a parable:

I once saw a Russian woman in hot pants at the Pyramids. First, I had an urge to grab her ass. Then I got heatstroke just looking at her.

Moral: There are two very good reasons to keep your skin covered in the Middle East. First, of course, is it’s just polite, and even normal people like myself (er) can respond strangely to the sight of naked flesh if they don’t see it often. Second, that sun will kill you.

I tend to spend most of my time in cities, so I want to look dressier, rather than sporty. But most of my wardrobe can adapt fine to a day in the desert or a hike up Mount Sinai.

1. Long-sleeve, button-front silk shirts.
I used to pick these up at thrift stores all the time, and I still do occasionally find one, but I have less time to comb the racks. I haven’t found a reliable first-hand source for them yet, but I always keep an eye out.

Hmmm... This doesn't look bad. But $98? That's why: thrift stores.

Silk is really sturdy and super-lightweight. It dries in a second, if you do a sink wash, and it’s hardy enough to handle whatever they do at the drop-off laundry. Buy dark colors, so it’s not see-through, and/or patterns (to hide stains).

If you can’t find silk, then button-front lightweight cotton shirts are fine. Either way, you want them to be longish–hanging over half your butt, if possible, and the sleeves should be full length. You can roll the sleeves up to your elbows, or keep them buttoned at your wrist if you’re in a very conservative situation, or cold.

2. Skinny ankle-length cotton or nylon pants with pockets.
Contrary to Celeste’s advice, I think tight clothing is A-OK. It makes you look more city-fied. And it’s not violating any modesty norms in the ME, contrary to what you might think.

I wasn’t planning on my super-skinny cropped cargo pants from J. Crew to be a travel essential, and now I wish I’d bought two pairs.

They’re very tight at the ankle, so they don’t slide down when I’m using a squat toilet. And the pockets are super-useful. I have other ankle-length pants, in nifty nylon-cotton blends, but they always lose because they don’t have pockets.

Typical capris, which end right below the knee or mid-calf, don’t do it for me. That exposes too much flesh for my taste. Too much sunburn and ogling potential.

And I wouldn’t go for leggings because, well, they’ve already got plenty of camel toes in the Middle East! (Thank you, ladies and germs! I’ll be here all week.)

3. Linen trousers.
OK, this is as close as I get to the typical desert-explorer look. I have a couple of pairs in brown and slate gray. Side pockets look proper enough (though you have to be careful about change falling out in buses). Linen is sturdy, and its rumpled-ness is somehow acceptable in high society, but you can also hike in them.

I just roll them up a couple of inches before venturing into any sketchy toilet situation.

4. Silver shoes.
You can wear the daggiest orthopedic things, but if they’re silver (or gold), you suddenly look like a fashion queen. These Doc Martens totally rocked in Cairo–nice thick soles so you can slog through muck.

I'm sorry I abandoned you in Ras al-Khaimah for getting too stinky! Next pair, I'll wear those little socklets, I promise.

It’s a bonus if your shoes are slip-off: easier to go in and out of mosques.

I also just bought these, from Ecco–not slip-off, but I think will do double-duty for low-level hiking.

5. Sports bras and tank tops.
The underpinnings. I’m not at all busty, but I do wear a sturdy bra when I go to Cairo. Young dudes in the street are like those detectors for earthquakes–they’re sensitive to the slightest jiggle.

Honestly, this might be slight overkill on my part–I’m making up for my first time in Cairo, when I actually walked around without a bra, which I wish someone had taken me aside and said, “Ahem.” Instead, some crazed dude grabbed my boob and then practically went skipping off down the street with glee. I think he might’ve felt a little like when I saw the Russian chick in hot pants: Must. Touch. It!!!

On top of a sturdy bra, I wear a very thin cotton tank top that’s very long. This guarantees my shirt isn’t see-through and covers up any gaping between button-front shirt and low-rise pants, or if wind from a bus speeding by blows my shirt up. Right now Uniqlo is making good super-long tank tops. I got some C&C California ones years ago that are nearly threadbare now, but that’s OK, since they’re just an under-layer.

Sort-of 6. Ankle-length skirt, with pockets.
Honestly, I have one of these, and I dutifully pack it every time, but I just can’t quite get on board with it. It’s relatively stylish–linen, tailored, with patch pockets. But it’s just outside the realm of my normal style, and I feel a little too much like Sensible Lady Adventurer when I wear it.

But I’m mentioning it because someone once pointed out a very good reason to wear a skirt while traveling: if you ever have to relieve yourself on the side of a road, perhaps with your whole bus looking on, a skirt gives you a little privacy.

So…just putting it out there.

7. Giant scarf.
Totally agree with Celeste on this. Always have one in your bag. I have a bunch of wonderful silk ones from Syria (sigh), but last year I got a giant (18″ x 84″) not-silk one in Morocco that has turned out to be more useful. It’s a little cozier in a/c situations, and slippery silk is tough as mosque-visit headscarf–this has a little texture so it stays in place.

Looks deceptively small...

And a really, really big scarf with distinctive colors can dress up a whole outfit. My Moroccan scarf has gold thread in it. With my shoes, it’s like an ensemble!

8.Short dresses.
I’m just developing this, but I have a nice mid-thigh stretchy tunic dress that I really like, so I tried it out with my little ankle-length pants, and presto–I’m covered up and hip-looking. Or, you know, as hip as it gets these days.

By the by, I totally yoinked this look off the streets of Cairo. Another Cairo-cool-girl standby: tight black long-sleeve top, with whatever crazy top you want over it. Only recommendable in winter, though, as having anything up under your armpits means you’ll have to do laundry sooner.

9. One pearl.
Thanks to Celeste, I have a beautiful one, from Kamoka Pearls. As she said when she gave it to me, it’s great travel jewelry. Like everything, sturdy and lightweight, but also a nice touch of bling.

10. Crunchable brimmed hat.
I’m undoing all my don’t-look-like-a-backpacker effort above, but I swear my brain will melt instantly if I don’t wear a hat. Right now, I have a kind of funky plaid one that I got in Thailand, with about a two-inch brim. Before that I had this funny crochet faux-fedora thing.

Do you have your own old-reliable clothing pieces? I’d love to hear them!

Santa Fe Guidebook Giveaway!

Hot off the presses!
We interrupt our Dubai programming to bring you this important announcement: the newest edition of Moon Santa Fe, Taos & Albuquerque has just arrived in stores!

The new edition is packed with little goodies–some great new restaurants in Santa Fe, to start with, and various Albuquerque improvements I picked up while researching the story I wrote for The New York Times last year.

To celebrate, I’m giving away three copies of the book. To enter, just leave a comment, any comment. Entries close Sunday, April 22 at midnight EST. I’ll pick winners by random-number generator, but to make it fun, your comment could be one wacky fact you know about New Mexico.

Fun fact #1: Not many people know this, but New Mexico is part of the United States! Just kidding. Sort of.

Good luck!

Dubai: The Skyline

I had the good fortune of staying in an apartment rented by a Hungarian skyscraper architect, with a view of the Burj Khalifa. Which, I’m sure you’ve heard, is the world’s tallest building. Tom Cruise climbed up the side of it. (My hostess said a friend worked on that production. They paid more than half a million dollars to take 22 windows off the building while they were shooting.) It is glittery and beautiful, and it lends a distinctly Oz-like element to the city.

Did I take a photo of the view? I did not. Meant to. Completely forgot.

This is what it looked like out the other side of the apartment (my bedroom) when I arrived.

It was daytime.

It didn’t clear up for several days, and I drifted around in a sort of apocalyptic fugue state until it did. Ah, here we go:

I'm calling that clear enough.

In the lower left part of that picture, you can see some strange silver things that look like cooling towers. My hostess explained that’s a central cooling plant for all the buildings around that area. Fascinating. Air-conditioning is as essential as oxygen here, I think.

I also failed to get a decent photo of Dubai’s other landmark building, the Burj al-Arab. I remember when it was built, and it looked pretty damn dramatic. Now the city has built up a bit, so that it doesn’t look like some weird space pod in the middle of nothing. Very near it is an attractive mall in a faux-old-bazaar style. I’m not even being ironic–it was attractive. It also happens to be built nearly on the site of the oldest Islamic-era settlement in the Emirates. That’s not irony–that’s just destiny, I guess.

Shamelessly poaching someone else's family-on-holiday snap. Thanks, whoever you were!

Another huge development is the Dubai Marina. I stayed here the last few days of my trip. It’s even walkable. That is, if you really don’t mind walking, especially across 22 lanes of traffic (there’s an overpass–don’t worry!). My first host, the skyscraper architect, had worked on a building in this area.

Dusk in the new city.

If you’re thinking, Wait–that all looks surprisingly tasteful–I thought Dubai was tacky?…well, yeah. The golden hour does wonders. There are also quite a lot of average-height, average-style buildings. There are a lot of token arches stuck on top of tall buildings, I guess to give them a faux-Islamic look. And then there are these arches, stuck on the top of these tall buildings:

Sorry for the bad framing. This from the window of one of those over-22-lanes-of-traffic overpasses.

Can the Chrysler Building sue for copyright infringement? And there are two of them because…? Because why not! That’s Dubai in a nutshell.

Anyhoo, because there are people from all over the world designing buildings here, you get some interesting mash-ups. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with this apartment complex (the lower part, foreground), because those little spires on top are straight out of Asia, but there’s also some kind of Mediterranean vibe:

Someone had a vision.

Dubai, to my surprise when I first went there in 2011, does have a semi-old part of town. You never read about that in the breathless architecture stories. The odd thing about the old-ish parts of any of the Emirati cities is that they’re usually penned in and dubbed a “Heritage Zone” or something like that. The buildings are like zoo animals–the ones that are so depressed they won’t mate, and so will eventually go extinct.

The old fort in Dubai is now a museum. A fairly good museum, in fact, filled with waxworks and assorted dioramas and even taxidermy flamingos. But the sun is setting on all that. Or is that just a shadow cast by all the tall buildings?

The black spots are swallows, not mosquitoes.

Dubai: Ibn Battuta Mall

Following up the runaway success of my post on Terminal 21 in Bangkok, I think I might become a specialist in theme malls. I admit I felt a little thrill at going to the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai not so much because I admire the 14th-century traveler (though I do), but because I was hoping for some really tacky things to take pictures of.

It certainly looked promising. The idea is that the mall’s various sections represent the major places Ibn Battuta traveled: Egypt, India, Persia and China.

Next to the mall is a hotel–that’s the place with the Morocco theme. (Because IB was from Morocco, I guess–so that’s his home base, where he rests his head?)

Louvre-ish pyramids have something to do with the next couple of photos, I think.

The entrance closest to the metro is the Egypt-theme one. Check it:

Actually, seeing how sites in Egypt are managed, I almost did feel like I was there.
But this gave it away.

So I’m sauntering in, thinking it’s gonna be super-cheesy…but this is some kind of crazy educational mall. There are all these displays about medieval Arab mathematicians and their assorted genius inventions.

Er. Except I can't remember what this was for. Astronomical readings of some kind.
"As soon as we're done here, we can all go get some new barrettes at Claire's. So, c'mon, everybody, let's focus."

In the Persia court, there was a touchscreen game to play, involving some surprisingly tricky geography and history questions. I got killed by the Black Death before I could make it to the Far East. Story of my life.

Climb on your donkey, bid farewell to your loved ones and begin your great journey!

One display even explained properly how all these Arab-invented navigational tools, like astrolabes and quadrants, work. I'm used to just seeing them in dusty museums. Here, you could play with them and line them up with fake stars and things. My actual retention of information is poor, but at the time, I certainly thought, “Wow–I finally get it!”

Astrolabes--you can't swing a cat in the Middle East without hitting one.

The coolest thing was this, in the India wing. Even though the explanation panels weren’t working, nor was the device itself. Guess what it is?

OK, I'll tell you: it's a clock.

I didn’t know it was a clock at the time–I only read about Al-Jazari’s elephant clock a couple of days later in a museum. But, still. I love that there’s even a bit of grass in the elephant’s trunk. For authenticity.

And the mall is just remarkably beautiful.

The dome in the Persia wing.

(If that green font is looking kind of familiar…yeah, it’s Starbucks.)

By the time I got to the China wing, I was genuinely agog.

That's a whole Chinese junk in the background.

The funny thing is that, despite all this lavish detail, the mall is just not a very good mall. It doesn’t rate a special air-conditioned tube entrance from the metro, so you have to trudge across the pavement in the heat. And if you look back to see how far you’ve come, you see a whole mass of power plants and smokestacks.

It’s all on one floor–no fancy escalators to take in the view from. And the shops aren’t particularly great–in fact, the whole place smells like vinyl from all the cheap shoe stores. (Not complaining–I got some much-needed new sneakers.) There’s a ‘Marble Slab Creamery’ (the much nicer Mall of the Emirates has a real Cold Stone) and other various not-quite-right businesses, like Borders books. Which I thought shouldn’t exist anymore.

And the clientele is a little more downscale. Which means that, instead of tourists in I’m-on-holiday getups and Emirati ladies in rhinestone-studded abayas, there were lots of people in sort of average clothing from wherever they were from. Which was frankly a bit of a relief after all the other Dubai craziness. And, in some cases, it meant they fit in nicely with the decor.

Which way to the Foot Locker?
Granny carts are an Arab invention too. Didn't you know?

If you’re curious about Ibn Battuta at all (Google did a doodle for his birthday on February 25), do yourself a favor and read Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s books about traveling in his footsteps. The series starts with Travels with a Tangerine, in which TM-S arrives in Dubai and visits this very mall. Hijinks ensue. Truly, it’s great travel writing–hilarious and edifying. You might even be able to buy it at the Borders.

Spring Cleaning and Queens Writers

That's me, chillin' in Astoria. (Actually, Donald Baechler sculpture at the Fisher Landau art center in LIC.)
I’m back in Astoria. Not for long, but for all of April at least. I have a massive stack of notebooks and photos (a digital stack, but a stack nonetheless) from my travels in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar–I’ll put those together into a few posts soon.

Now I’m just enjoying a little minor calm. I was supposed to be jetting off to Lebanon at the end of this week, but when I got back from the UAE, I realized that was utter folly. My brain was totally full, and I was fried. There’s nothing like canceling plans to make you feel like you suddenly have all the time in the world!

This is false, of course. I have to write a book, on a deadline. The deadline’s not till December, but at the rate time is whipping by, I’ll be freaking out soon enough. Actually, I’m doing a little preemptive freaking out, just so I’m in practice when the time comes.

This leads me to point #1 of this post: the return of the Queens Writers Fellowship. After last year, I’ve got a small crew of people who pop in from time to time. But I’d love to have someone in the office for the better part of April. We have lots of space, facilities for lunch, good coffee, etc. Drop me an email and tell me what you’re working on. I’ll be here typity-typing all of April (except for April 5, 6, 20 and 27).

Point #2 of this post: Astoria Ugly is rolling along. It got a mention in the Wall Street Journal recently, because I imagine when you type “astoria new apartment buildings” into Google, the word “ugly” just auto-fills. AsUg, as I’ve started calling it, is more than a year old, and the ugly just keeps coming. It couldn’t have gotten this far without the excellent winter blogsitting of an architect named David, who has since moved to Puerto Rico. I never met him in person. I love the Internet.

Point #3: Queens Love is rolling. I’m contributing, but barely. More than 10 other Queens geniuses are filling it up with images that make my heart swell with borough pride. Queens Writers Fellowship participant Jeff Orlick is the genius who started it. I predict more great things.

Point #4: I have to warn you, there might be a lot more pictures and a bit less text on this blog in months to come. All writing energy is getting channeled elsewhere.

And on that note, back to work.

Spring Break Guidebook Giveaway!

You’re never too old for a little spring break… That’s why I’m giving away two copies of the newest edition of The Rough Guide to Cancun & the Yucatan. The book came out last fall, so the info’s quite fresh and includes some great new spots I was excited to discover during research last winter: a cool Maya hut near some of the peninsula’s best cenotes, for instance, and some great restaurants and new hotels in Valladolid.

If you head south now, yes, there’s a little spring-break craziness in Cancun, but even 15 minutes south in Puerto Morelos, the beach scene is pretty mellow. If you head to Mexico during Semana Santa, the week before Easter (April 1-8), you’ll be on vacation with pretty much the entire country. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds–as I discovered a couple of summers ago, Mexicans are really fun tourists, and in some places, like the little church in San Juan Chamula outside San Cristobal de las Casas, it’s nice to be part of a crowd.

Win your copy of the book just by entering a comment below–maybe let me know what kind of Mexican food you’re hankering for. I could go for a cochinita pibil torta right about now…

The contest will be open until next Sunday night, March 25, at midnight EDT. I’ll pick two comments through a random-number generator. Thanks for entering!

Update: I am now starving. A little slow on picking the winning numbers, but here we go…

Oh, what the heck: you’re all winners! After discounting Maria (no offense, but who already has a copy of the book), that’s exactly the number of extra copies I have lying around here. Christine, yours will be coming by courier in May (I’ll explain by email).

Technical Difficulties

My WordPress has decided to get cranky on me, making it impossible to insert photos or add links or anything without a lot of hand coding.

I do like hand coding. When I have oodles of time. Now is not that time. So apologies to the exactly one person I know who obsessively refreshes this page every Monday. It must’ve been rough for you there…

Next week, I hope to have it sorted.

(If anyone wants to do any further investigation into the problem, I’d love it, as I haven’t had more than a couple of hours to look into it myself. I’m using WP 3.3.1, Thesis Theme 1.8.1. Auto-insert of pictures won’t work, nor will visual editing, and the whole style toolbar has just vanished. I changed the theme and deactivated all the plugins, so it’s not that, which is what WP forums are suggesting. Also reinstalled WP. No love.)

Queens Love

Hi all. I’m in Dubai as we speak, watching from the 18th floor of a building as a minor sandstorm swirls around about 28 construction cranes. I haven’t yet had a chance to collect my thoughts (or all my funny pictures) on this subject of grandiose city construction.

So in the meantime, allow me to introduce you to:

Queens Love!

This fantabulous new tumblr is a great outlet for a dozen or so Queens denizens, including Our Illustrious Leader and Generator of Brilliant Food Ideas, Jeff Orlick. As you’d expect from anything about Queens, it’s mostly about food.

PS: OK, OK–here’s one funny Dubai picture.

handsome man

I like to think I keep life waiting too.

Terminal 21, Bangkok

OK, this is just total eye candy for travel geeks. I don’t even like malls. But Bangkok is a mall kind of town, and when Rod (yes, he met us in Bangkok again this year) told me that there was a new airport-theme mall, I of course had to go.

It’s at the Asok BTS stop (aka Sukhumvit Soi 21). You can enter from the SkyTrain level, but we arrived on foot.

At an airport-theme mall, the security setup even makes sense!

The info-booth girls wore adorable outfits. Two, in fact: At night, the stewardess uniform was black with green trim.

Airport-style signage was everywhere.

Each floor is a different “destination.” The London floor had a red double-decker bus. The floor with the movie theater was Hollywood, of course.

The Istanbul floor had a lot of booths selling crafts. They had some font confusion. Unless perhaps Terminal 21 also enables time travel back to pre-Atatuturk days of Ottoman Turkish script?

I also felt vaguely uncomfortable on the ground floor, the Caribbean.

They seemed to put the most effort into the San Francisco floor.

Just when I started to feel like I was in an even cheesier version of Fisherman’s Wharf, we found the food court. Ah, maybe that’s why there’d been so much care put into the SF floor. The food court–aka Pier 21–was an assemblage of some of Bangkok’s best-known street-food people, in spiffy mall style. But not too spiffy style–I like how everyone still operated out of plastic tubs.

We grazed and gorged.

Afterward, we stopped at the bathroom. The theme-ness started getting a little confused here, because the bathroom apparently had its own theme.

It was all set up inside like some rustic pizza joint, with brick everywhere and a wood oven (yes, in the bathroom), and a gargantuan rolling pin hanging from the ceiling over all the toilet stalls. I was a little lulled by the fancy Japanese toilets with the warm seats, so I didn’t take any pictures.

As Rod pointed out, they didn’t go quite as far over the top with the airport/travel theme as we would have liked–I mean, that woman dusting the San Francisco trolley was wearing a random French maid outfit, when she could’ve been wearing a depressing powder-blue polyester jumpsuit!

Why didn’t they consult the real experts before building? An army of frequent fliers could’ve over-designed the place. The Thais just have to focus on the food. Now that’s synergy.

Hydra Retreat

We were on Hydra for two and a half weeks, writing the whole time. Inside, it looked like this:

My neck hurts just looking at this.

But outside, it looked like this:

Photo by Peter.

The only time we took breaks was to eat. And to eat, we had to walk all the way down the hill. On Hydra, there are no cars, only donkeys. But we couldn’t call a donkey like you call a taxi. Here’s a token donkey photo:

That's our luggage getting loaded up.

But fortunately Greece delivers in the food department, and is perfect for two people who are too mentally distracted to think about food more than a little bit. We didn’t cook at home all that much because, even though it was winter, there were still two tavernas open and they gave us plenty of tasty things to eat every night.

The nice thing about tavernas is that they make something different each night. If you’re like me and hate the tyranny of choice, just go to Greece. You will have very few options, but they will all be good. Fried calamari the day the fishermen come in (and what calamari: so sweet, like scallops!). Beets with their greens. Lentil soup. Eggplant baked with feta.

In the grocery store, I saw this, and was baffled:

Mmm, tentacle-y.

I’d never heard of this particular dish, but apparently it’s common enough that it’s available as a prefab home version. But then one day at the taverna, they had it. And now I see why it’s considered so essential–Greek comfort food, all slippery and chewy, with lots of kefalotyri on top.

Sadly, most of the other things we ate have slipped my mind. This is the thing about Greek food–such basic components, but occasionally there’s a combo that surprises in part because it’s so logical, but why didn’t you think of it before?

This is most memorable in spoon sweets I’ve had: sour cherry with rose geranium, fig with nutmeg and, on this trip, grapes with something intangible, sort of soft, strangely savory… We finally asked Matina, the woman at our top-choice taverna who had taken to squeezing us and kissing us every time we showed up, and she said, “Basil. Grapes and basil. Pick the seeds out of the grapes, cook with an equal amount of sugar, then set aside with a bunch of basil in overnight.”

We ate breakfast and lunch at home. Breakfast was fresh yogurt, sold in a nice little clay crock, and honey and, fine, some muesli for substance. Once Peter started going to the bakery, we had hard, dry, not-very-sweet breakfast cookies too.

For lunch, I took whatever veg looked good at the store and slow-cooked it in olive oil. I was feeling pretty pleased with the flat Roman beans with a little tomato. Then I made a few other things, and they were pretty good too. And then our last day we had some straggler zucchini and some leeks and some sad parsley, and not even tomato, and I wasn’t feeling so good about the whole thing, but it turned out to be the best one yet.

Slow-cooking in olive oil is really the moral of this story (or at least a more accessible one than ‘Go spend the winter on Hydra’). It is the best, easiest thing in the world. Pour about an eighth-inch of olive oil in your pot and put it on medium heat. Rinse your vegetables. Don’t bother drying them. Chop them up, plus some onion, maybe, and/or some garlic. If you’ve got herbs, chop those. Put everything in the pan with the olive oil, plus some salt and pepper. If you’ve got a little canned tomato, you can add that. Toss it around and put the lid on. When it’s simmering, turn it down to low and let it go until you look up from your writing again–45 minutes? Let cool a little. Eat with crusty bread and feta. Leave leftovers out on the stove, covered, for later room-temp snacking.