Category: Travails of a Guidebook Author

All Aboard the Crimson Sofa!

Now I see why, when people sell their books, they just copy and paste the announcement from Publishers Weekly. I don’t really know what else to say.

Co-author of Forking Fantastic! and travel writer Zora O’Neill’s THE CRIMSON SOFA: Journeys Into the Arabic Speaking World, which uses the author’s twenty years of learning the thorny Arabic language and her travels in the Middle East and North Africa to shine a personal, illuminating and often humorous light on the diverse cultural and social landscape of the various Arabic-speaking countries, to Amanda Cook at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in a pre-empt, by Gillian MacKenzie of the Gillian MacKenzie Agency (World English).

To make it seem a little more concrete, I did a Google image search for “crimson sofa.” I got this. Hmmm.

Go eye patch!

And then this:

The lovely Diana Vreeland, on her lovely crimson sofa
The lovely Diana Vreeland, on her lovely crimson sofa

Which made me realize…duh, I have a crimson sofa. But I don’t look that glam on it, and I won’t be hanging out on it much in the coming year. The book won’t seem real until I start traveling and writing. First stop: Egypt, this fall.

Survey: Where Should Roving Gastronome Go?

Big news here at RG HQ: I think I’m getting more…mature. A little wiser. At least in the field of travel.

After, oh, 20 years of slogging around the world being rigorously independent, I’m finally realizing there’s tremendous value in putting yourself in the hands of experts.

Ag Museum: Closer

In the last couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure of going on a few organized outings–whether a full-on week in Syria with Anissa Helou, a couple days of Thai cooking classes in Chiang Mai, or, most recently, just a morning taco-noshing tour with Eat Mexico. And you know what? I learned something! I felt connected! I was often so giddy I was jumping up and down!

So I want to share this experience, via Roving Gastronome tours. They’ll combine the knowledge I’ve gained from guidebook research trips with fantastic insider connections–the kind of thing that makes a group excursion really worthwhile.

To this end, I’m working with the delightful Brown + Hudson, a crew of savvy Brits who have been leading tours for years and seem to know everyone everywhere. (Yup–same fab guys who put together the stunning itinerary for the Forking Fantastic! Morocco outing. Which reminds me: I’m headed there soon! Yipes.)

Right now, we’re tweaking details for a fall trip (the location’s a surprise! I’ll tell you soon!). But for future trips, I’d love to have your input. Please fill out this quick survey to give me an idea what you’d like to see in a tour: destinations, cost, timing, etc. It’s easy, and who doesn’t want to spend five minutes fantasizing about travel?

Looking forward to hearing your input! And I can’t wait to tell you what we’ve got in the works…

Moon New Mexico Giveaway

Whoo-hoo! Free stuff! I just got a big ol’ box of copies of my new Moon New Mexico guidebook, hot off the presses.

And you reap the benefits: I’m giving away four copies, so you can get your summer travel planning started right. To enter, just leave a comment below by Monday, April 4 at midnight (end of the day Monday). I’ll pick four random numbers that day.

I’m not judging the quality of your comments, but it would be fun for everyone if you told us where your favorite place in New Mexico is, where you’d most like to go or how old you were when you finally realized New Mexico is part of the United States.

Let the games begin…

#Egypt #Egypt #Egypt!

Garden City GateI’m always surprised when I see a picture of Cairo and it isn’t sepia-toned. Not from some nostalgic glow, but from the dirt. The city, in my memory, is an even dull beige. That’s because it’s freshly coated every spring with a layer of dust from the khamsin wind, and never fully scrubbed clean.

Sand and dirt and trash has been piling up in Cairo for millennia–it’s not exactly a clean city. But the last time I visited, in 2007, it felt like Cairenes cared even less than usual–like the city had nearly crushed its own inhabitants. So, in the midst of the protests of the last two weeks, I was most touched by the images of the protesters collecting trash, organizing recycling and scrubbing the streets. Could the layers of grime in the city really just have been symptomatic of a generation-long bout of depression? The gloom has finally lifted. Boy-boy (Bye-bye), Mubarak–first phase of house-cleaning complete.
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Mexico #6: Back Roads

I love that even though the Yucatan has very few roads, and I’ve been down there more than a dozen times, there are still some roads I haven’t been on. Such as the road between Valladolid and Izamal, which passes through the village of Uayma. Where there’s this:

Uayma

I also had time to poke around bits of Valladolid I hadn’t had time to see before–like the portrait gallery on the second floor of city hall.
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Queens Writers “Fellowship”

Fellow Queens-dwellers: I have room in my home office here in Astoria. I’d like to share it with you. So I’m instituting

The 2011 Queens Writers Fellowship.

That sounds so much grander than “come hang out at my house and write,” right?

Seriously, here’s the deal: I love my home office. It’s sunny and has lots of space. But I can’t get jack done unless there’s someone around to keep me honest–the coffee shop effect. If you’re a freelancer, you know this phenomenon all too well. But since I have a nice office, I can’t justify going to a coffee shop. Plus, in Queens, we don’t really have many suitable places for this.

So: I’m accepting applications for this extra desk space in my office.

You can come by most anytime. You can use the wi-fi. You can use the phone. You can make yourself coffee and stash snacks in the fridge. You can stash some books in the bookcase. (I’ll make room on a shelf.)

This “fellowship” will last three months, with an option for renewal. This gives us both some flexibility, so if you find you’re not using the space much, you can hand it off. Or stay on, if you’re just about to finish the novel.

If you’re interested, email me by January 31 and let me know what you’re working on, where you live and what your normal work hours are. I’m open to a lot of things, and the schedule can be worked out. I’m envisioning this as a daytime thing, but if you want somewhere to write in the evenings after your office job, that might work too.

This would all start February 7, ideally. I’m back from some traveling, and I need to buckle down. You’ll be going winter stir-crazy and need a change of venue.

And, in the long run, I’m curious to see how much interest there is in Queens for a dedicated writers space, seeing how we don’t have a lot of that here. So even if the February-April timeframe doesn’t work for you, or you’re reading this after the deadline, drop me a note. I’ll let you know when the desk in my office is free, and if/when we can get other people organized for a separate space.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing from you!

Mexico #5: Snack Break!

OK, time for less narrative, more pretty pictures.

Bees

Bees swarm the displays of sweets in every market. I always thought people must bring the bees with them, and put them out to show off how sweet their treats are. I mean, where the hell are the bees coming from in the middle of the city? But then I saw a girl with a fly whisk actually trying to brush them away. (I guess every other vendor has just given up.) And then I noticed bees on flowers in someone’s teeny front-almost-all-concrete-patch of a yard. The ancient Maya kept bees and traded honey. Those bees are here to stay.

Here’s another Hanal Pixan specialty, mucbipollo. It’s a big ol’ tamale, studded with black beans and chicken.

Mucbipollo

We stopped at the market in Oxkutzcab–I’ve never been there early enough to see much action. But in the morning, the whole front area is filled with people selling oranges and flowers wholesale. Inside are snack and craft vendors. And this woman, selling delicate thin disks of chocolate, patted out by hand like tortillas. Her fingerprints were in every one.

Chocolate

The chocolate was completely bitter, and so intense as to be medicinal. Good medicinal.

Just across from her sat a woman shelling xpelon, the little black beans eaten everywhere in the Yucatan:

Beans

Not all tradition is good. I see this stuff everywhere too, and it fills me with horror.

Cake

I believe it’s white bread slathered with some kind of mayo-y treatment, and studded with canned peas. Hilarious, in an El-Bulli-wait-I-thought-this-was-going-to-be-something-normal mindf**k way.

Here’s some slightly more high-brow junk food:

Best Bar Snack

Poblano pepper stuffed with cream cheese (most beloved cheese of the Yucatan, aka queso Filadelfia) and shrimp, and–yeah, baby–battered and deep-fried. Tastes great even if you’re drinking some healthy green juice instead of your ninth beer of the night.*

And…well…just this:

Refriend Beans

*Wondering where to get the deliciousness? Check Pescaditos, in Cancun. Details in my Cool Cancun & Isla Mujeres iPhone app.

*Flickr set from this trip
*Mexico #1: Where the Party at?
* Mexico #2: Partying on…and on
*Mexico #3: Party Favors
* Mexico #4: Howdy, Cowboy
* Mexico #6: Back Roads

Mexico #4: Howdy, Cowboy

In Tizimin, I was driving around the main square, and I noticed there was an awful lot of horse shit in the street. “What happened here?” I wondered out loud. “Did we just miss a parade?”

That was a little bit of a joke for my mom, who was in the passenger seat. See, she and my brother* are all nature-y, and go hiking around in the woods looking for animal dung so they can figure out what the animals have been up to. So I was being an urban tracker. I started following the horse shit, but soon I lost the trail, and I had to check the bus schedules anyway.

As we were driving out of town, we found the parade. Or we found the tail end of it–a huge mob of people on horseback, waiting for the procession to move forward. It was a good two blocks of horses, all edging and prancing and shuffling around. Moms, kids, and loads of cowboys were all saddled up and ready to ride.

Horse Parade

I’ve never seen so many horses in the Yucatan. Aside from the Pollo Vaquero logo, you just don’t see a lot of cowboy imagery in the Yucatan. That whole open-plains, rope-and-ride, oompah-music kind of scene doesn’t happen here, because there aren’t a lot of cows.

Horse ParadeExcept for around Tizimin. I’m not sure how or when the ranching industry got started here, but the forest has been cleared, and I guess cows graze around in the tall greenery somewhere–I haven’t actually seen a lot of them, but I have eaten their meat, at an excellent restaurant in Tizimin. It was heartwarming, seeing all this Western wear–plaid shirts, big hats. I grew up around that, and even if I’m a city slicker now, I do like horses. If my previous posts were about seeing odder things than expected, this afternoon was all about being surprised by a more familiar thing.

Horse Parade

And then, this guy. He looks completely Arab, and not just because he was a foot taller than everyone there. Lebanese and Syrians came to the Yucatan in the early 20th century. This guy’s family must’ve gotten into ranching at some point.

Horse Parade

You might’ve noticed a lot of beer cans in the previous photos. Yup, a beer company was sponsoring the whole shindig. These guys just skipped the horses and rode the truck.

Horse Parade

I’m a terrible reporter. I have no idea what the parade was for (though we did see a statue of the Virgin being carried down one of the streets). I just liked the pretty horses.

*Regular readers of this blog may know, but it never hurts to remind: my brother just wrote a great book for hiking around in the woods looking for other animal sign: Bird Feathers: A Guide to North American Species.

*Flickr set from this trip
*Mexico #1: Where the Party at?
* Mexico #2: Partying on…and on
*Mexico #3: Party Favors
* Mexico #5: Snack Break!
* Mexico #6: Back Roads

Mexico #3: Party Favors

Beyond Hanal Pixan, fall is dotted with village fiestas and fairs of all sorts. Izamal is notorious for having some kind of festivity from mid-October straight on through December. When we passed through, it was the season for gremios, which pilgrimages to the church, made by each trade syndicate, such as engineers, taxi drivers, etc. Each syndicate dresses up in all their Mayan finery, parades to the churchyard, does some dances, and then parades off to some block party somewhere. If you follow the parade, by all reports, you’ll wind up at a pretty serious throwdown.

The whole parade-and-dancing part of it takes quite a while, as there’s lots of stops, and someone setting off fireworks the whole time. (I guess this lets you know where the parade is at any given time? Bottle rockets as GPS pings?) I was pretty impressed with just how much dancing was involved once I laid eyes on a guy with a big platter on his head. Damn! He had to hold onto that platter with one raised arm through all the dances! My muscles started seizing up in sympathy.

But the guy looked so cheerful. His white teeth were gleaming, under his nicely trimmed little mustache, and his eyes were all atwinkle. Once I got up close to him, I saw why he was so delighted.

He had a pig head on his own head!

Pig head

OK, this kind of thing is exactly what I love about the Yucatan. Everything’s pretty mellow, and I basically know what’s going on. It’s not like you’re in an obviously trippy place–people aren’t dressed up in crazy masks and taking peyote. So just when I think everything’s kind of familiar and pretty…some dude starts dancing with a roasted pig’s head!

The previous post was another example of this same blindsiding-with-bizarre. It turns out it’s worth spending so much time in visiting a place not so you actually get to know it, but so you think you’ve gotten to know it–and then are even more boggled by the oddities.

These, on the other hand, are totally normal party elements in Izamal:

Wolverine

Loteria Beast

*Flickr set from this trip
*Mexico #1: Where the Party at?
* Mexico #2: Partying on…and on
* Mexico #4: Howdy, Cowboy
* Mexico #5: Snack Break!
* Mexico #6: Back Roads