Miss Adventures

Paul Theroux may be a curmudgeon, but he’s a damn good travel writer (if that’s what you must call him). This piece in the Guardian about how and why Theroux became a travel writer comes a few days shy of the release of his books The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express as Penguin Modern Classics.

I couldn’t agree with Theroux more on this point:

The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance - buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

I can hardly stand reading a long-form travel writing feature (unless it’s in Outside Magazine), even though that’s the line of work I’m in. It’s an inconvenient truth. And, yet, the guidebook writing business is one that leaves little opportunity to report on the distasteful aspects of travel. As guidebooks must take on a certain form - where to go, what to do, where to eat, etc. - there’s little room to list the negatives. And so you cull the best from what you have experienced.

I think that blogs offer the critical travel writer a great forum for expressing the more personal aspects of trips. Perhaps, some day, I will have the chance to write a book about what I really think about Italy, Turkey, India, etc. Stay tuned!

Dear friends,

I must apologize for the long delay in writing. But, I have been up to big things. First of all, I have been concentrating on my writing and my other blog Italofile.com. I am using Italofile as a way to explore the Italy travel landscape beyond the pages of my books The Unofficial Guide to Central Italy and Michelin’s Green Guide Tuscany. Indeed, Italofile covers all of Italy. So, please have a look.

We are still in Turkey and loving it. While Ankara may not be the most scintillating of cities, we have enjoyed traveling around to many exciting sites in Turkey: Istanbul, Kaş, Safranbolu, and numerous daytrips in Anatolia. Next up is a trip to Ephesus and Selçuk, which I hope to report back on when we return.

I’ve left MissAdventures.com fallow for such a long time that it will be hard to get up and running again. Bear with me. But hopefully having taken a break from this site for a while will have provided more ideas to grow.

One thing that I’d like to do is to take this blog into a slightly new direction: less about me and more about travel ideas to Turkey, India, or wherever I may be next! In other words, less about the “Miss” (or, now, “Mrs.”) and more about the Adventures. I’ve had fun and good feedback on Italofile, so I’d like to extend the creativity and expand the postings on MissAdventures as well.

Thanks a lot for your understanding and patience.

Cheers, Melanie

Last weekend we went to Beypazarı, a small village an hour and a half by bus from Ankara. Located on the old “Istanbul to Baghdad route,” Beypazarı has been inhabitated by various tribes and peoples, including the Seljuks, who left behind a 12C mosque, and the Ottomans, whose “konak” houses dot the town’s hillside. Beypazarı is known for its silver, especially filigree work, and is responsible for 60% of Turkey’s carrot (havuç) production.

Beypazarı, whose name translates roughly as “gentleman’s market,” struck me as a typical Anatolian village. Off the hot, dusty (but tidy) cobbled streets, old men huddled, drank tea, and played backgammon. A majority of the native women covered their hair with broad, patterned silk scarves that fell to about waist-length. Meanwhile, during the festival, young men wearing finger cymbals danced two-by-two to music that was part Turkish flute (ney) and part techno drumbeat. Near the town’s Ottoman Müze, what appeared to be a high school woodwind quartet played the requisite “Rondo alla Turca” from Mozart’s Sonata No. 11.

While more cosmopolitan parts of Turkey, such as Istanbul, like to play up their historical and geographical connection to mainland Europe, Anatolia looks to its pan-Turkish heritage. And, Beypazarı being the Turkish heartland, it wasn’t a surprise to find a large mosaic map in one town square which highlighted the “Turkic” areas of the world: Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaristan (Bulgaria), Turkmenistan, Uighur Mongolia, etc. Groups of beautiful, dark-haired, light-eyed girls wore the traditional costumes from these regions.

But back to the food. Those famous carrots were a central theme at the Beypazarı Festival. Multiple vendors offered bottles of fresh carrot juice, while others sold carrot helva. Further along, there were stands overflowing with dried fruits (including incredibly sweet sun-dried tomatoes) and nuts, packages of grape leaf dolmas and walnut baklava, and ayran, a yogurt drink not unlike a lassi. We stopped at a döner kebap stand and later watched village women rolling out and cooking gözleme (a bit like a pancake) filled with a hard, white cheese (beyaz peynir) and parsley (maydonaz). Beypazarı’s classic dish, which we didn’t get a chance to taste, is a casserole of lamb, rice, eggplant and earthy, easily attainable ingredients. The village also makes good use of a copious amount of walnuts by preserving them in a “walnut sausage,” a confection that looks exactly like the meat product but is flavored with nuts and sweetened with grape jelly. In addition to ayran and carrot juice, Beypazarı residents wash down their meals with mineral waters from the Inözü Valley.

Only an hour and a half from Ankara, Beypazarı is probably a sleepy town for 364 days per year. But it still merits a visit for its lovely Ottoman houses, gorgeous silver, and honest food. And even though the village is not quite on the tourist route, it has a surprisingly sophisticated, English-language website, helpful for planning a daytrip.

Hi there! Are you looking for Ms. Adventure, the website of the Animal Planet television show that launched in January 2007? Or are you looking for Miss Adventures, the on again-off again blog of freelance travel and food writer Melanie Mize Renzulli?

If it’s the latter…welcome! If not, check out Ms. Adventure here.

It’s unfortunate I didn’t know about the auditions for the Animal Planet show (heck…I was in India getting blessed by elephants, adopting stray cats, and running from cobrawallahs). But, I have no hard feelings. Hopefully, as more and more people watch the show they’ll stumble upon my site. It’s also kind of weird how I once worked for the Travel Channel (like Animal Planet, under the Discovery, Inc., umbrella). But again…no hard feelings!

I am going to start posting more frequently in the coming months, so, as they say on t.v., stay tuned.

It’s not fair to compare Bombay and Hong Kong, two bustling Asian cities once under the realm of Britain, but I couldn’t help doing so while on a recent trip.
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Fellow misplaced expat Karilyn hit the nail on the head with her recent comment. Indeed, I have come down with jaundice and I’m finally somewhat well enough to sit up straight and write about it.

Basically, I have succumbed to the second - yes, second - outbreak of jaundice in Bombay over the past three months. Hurrah! I can count myself among many of Bombay’s movers and shakers who also have the disease! My doctor believes it probably came from drinking ice. Apparently, none of the poorer people, or “servants,” as she called them, have contracted the disease - only the people who are able to go to nice clubs and let their guards down when ordering gin and tonics. Let’s just say I don’t think I’ll be ordering any of those again soon.
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I can’t be the only one who thinks that keeping up with a blog is impossible when faced with holiday weekends and the lack of a day job, can I? I’m back from my trip up to New York & the gIsland (Long Island), it’s late, and I think I used up all my vocabulary during my many drunken binges over the weekend.

Okay…they weren’t binges.
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This gives a whole new meaning for the word ‘Weblog’

Back when the whole hullabaloo over gay marriage was in effect, I wrote this lil service article on spec, just for the hell of it. I shopped it out a few places, but I think that the mainstream papers are a little apprehensive about gay-oriented travel.

I’m not gay but I occasionally work in a gay-friendly restaurant (oh, I’ve got some fun stories!), and I can’t imagine why catering to the gay market or occasionally running a gay travel feature could hurt any kind of publication. Advertisers and editors have no idea what kind of disposable income they’re sniffing at.

Anyhow, with Capital Pride upon us, I thought I’d share this piece with y’all. It’s too late to sell it now and the info will be stale next time around.

Oh yeah…and this is also a bit in response to the people on the Boots forum who listed DC as their least favorite city of all time. There’s so much more beyond the monuments…you have no idea…
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Knowing that I was going to one of the nation’s oyster capitals, I also knew that I would eat well. But when I got to Apalach, I was surprised to learn just how small the area was. It was all made clear when we had to go to the Piggly Wiggly.
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The word “Apalachicola” ranks up there with Okeechobee and Massapequa as one of the more amusing Native American place names. It has a foreign air, but just enough grit that you instantly know that the town can be found somewhere on a map of America.

In fact, you can find Apalachicola on a map of Florida, in the central-western crook of the Panhandle about two hours south of Tallahassee. Some people call this area of the country L.A. - or, Lower Alabama - and, coming originally from Alabama, I know this to be true. This is the land of NASCAR, country music, and yellow flies. Nine out of ten times, this is the kind of place I avoid. But I was in for a surprise.
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Of course, on the day before I take off for vacation, work is crazy. And, of course, almost all of today’s work came in the later half of the day. No matter, though. I’m heading off to Florida tomorrow; in my mind, I’m already there…
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The Onion Always Gets it Right:
U.S. Gives Up Trying to Impress England…
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Are there any truly unspoiled destinations in the world? Conservation International and the National Geographic Society seem to think so.
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