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

My staple during this hot Turkish summer has been kisir, what some call Turkish Tabbouleh. It’s not really a salad, but it makes the perfect cold side for stuffed peppers or karniyarik (another Turkish dish I’m making a lot lately).

I learned this recipe from my maid, but you can also find a perfectly good version in Claudia Roden’s Arabesque. Her book shows kisir served in traditionally in lettuce leaves, but you can easily leave it in a bowl if you feel like skipping the presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a ton of books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Turkey and the Middle East. While most of them are useful in learning about the region’s history and culture, few hold my interest for more than a couple pages. That’s not the case for the following three books, which I am reading or have skimmed heavily (and plan to read when I get around to it).

Birds Without Wings. This novel, by the author of Corelli’s Mandolin, is set in Turkey during the population exchange. It gives a good overview of Greek/Turkish relations and also has a moving personal story.

The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet. Part of the dance that is a visit to Turkey and the Middle East is the browsing (and possibly purchasing) of carpets. You sit, drink tea, and let carpet sellers unfurl dozens of colorful rugs in front of you. This book, which focuses more on Iran, the home of the Persian carpet, is a good primer on the history and production of carpets in general. I’ve yet to find a similar book that is specific to Turkey. Another book I like in this category is Tribal and Village Rugs: The Definitive Guide to Design, Pattern & Motif.

From the Holy Mountain. William Dalrymple has penned many excellent historical/travel books. This one’s subtitle is “A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium,” and the author travels through parts of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in search of the roots of Christianity. I am also keen to point out Mr. Dalrymple’s latest nonfiction work, The Last Mughal, which looks at the events that led up to the downfall of India’s last emperor, Bahadur Shah II. In case you didn’t know, the Mughals of India had roots in Turkey and the Middle East. So, in many ways, I feel like I’m following in Dalrymple’s footsteps…but perhaps in reverse.

As I come across more good reads about Turkey, I will add them to my Amazon store. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these suggestions.

It’s an hour later and I’m still bawling over a piece that I saw on BBC News regarding the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange. A situation this grave is enough to make an inactive person like me want to do something to help. While I may consider a letter-writing campaign at some point, I’m moved right now to assist the Veterans for Peace organization get the word out about the lawsuit Agent Orange victims (American, Vietnamese, and Korean) are bringing against the manufacturers of the chemical which is still causing gross deformations in children. The appeals hearing for the lawsuit takes place on Monday, June 18. In the meantime, the VFP is trying to get 1 million signatures for its petition to President Bush as well as raise contributions for the AO Victims Tour.

Of course, the Veterans for Peace do more than just advocate for compensation for AO victims. They currently are involved in educating the public about the human cost of war, and have campaigns concerning Iraq, Vieques and the School of the Americas, to name just a few. Humanitarians may also be interested in a new report about the vast number of children among Iraqi refugees or the ongoing efforts in Darfur by the UN Refugee Agency.

Okay…now I’ve done my part (at least a little bit). Now go do yours.

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.

No one ever writes anything particularly special about Ankara. Guidebooks don’t dedicate many pages to the capital. And, when I mentioned to people that I was moving to Turkey, their faces lit up:

They: “Istanbul?!”
Me: “No, Ankara.”
They:”Oh, too bad. Istanbul is great.”

My first impressions of Ankara had been quite favorable, up until this past Tuesday, when a bomb exploded in Ulus, killing six. I’m now a bit loathe to go to the old city (eskişehir), as you can imagine. Nevertheless, not even London, Madrid, New York, or Washington is immune to these types of things. For what it’s worth, three days on after a bombing, this city is unshaken. Turkey knows how to handle these situations, it seems.

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Earthquakes. Forest fires. New Orleans. Iraq. So many natural and man-made disasters are in the news lately that I keep hearing about “evacuation plans.” As serious as such things may be, I couldn’t help thinking about using the phrase in a humorous way on a baby onesie. Click on the photo above to see the finished product. Forgive me for going off on a tangent, but sometimes laughter is the best medicine.

In case you missed it, the New York Times ran Seth Sherwood’s 36 Hours in Istanbul this weekend. I’m looking forward to following Sherwood’s suggestions and telling you all about them very soon. Before that, we’ll be doing some traveling in Anatolia. Stay tuned…

We arrived in Turkey at a very interesting time. The Battle for Turkey’s Soul is afoot, pitting the “sons and daughters” of Atatürk (as well as the Turkish military) versus the “headscarf republic,” or Islamists. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish secularists have marched in Istanbul and Ankara at the slightest hint that the prime minister and president of this country both could come from the AK Party. Yet there are some people here that believe that the silent majority favors a government that has strong ties to faith.

Turkey is fascinating because it is the only majority Muslim country that is devoutly secularist. Atatürk’s mission to fashion Turkey into a modern republic included banning religious dress within state institutions. Therefore, for instance, women who wear headscarves and wish to study at the university must remove their scarves in the classroom. A revelation (to me) during these few weeks of constitutional crisis is that Prime Minister Erdoğan sends his daughter to school in the U.S. so that she can study at university AND wear a headscarf. It’s the difference of freedom from religion (Turkey) and freedom of religion (U.S.).

I cannot even personally begin to understand nor analyze the situation in Turkey. And, I don’t know if I want to - at least not in this forum. One thing I have come to learn in the few weeks that I have lived here is that Turks take themselves very, very seriously. As Jan Morris writes in the forward of Mary Lee Settle’s excellent book Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place:

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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 has been almost nine months since I left India and last posted on the blog. (You’ll also notice I moved cyber addresses - from http://tblogs.bootsnall.com/miss to here.)

I was ready to leave India last April, but now I look back on that chaos quite fondly. Indeed, I was also fond of today’s holiday - Republic Day - mostly because it falls in late January, one of the most pleasant times weather-wise to be in India, and especially Bombay. Oh to feel those tepid “winter” breezes coming off of Chowpatty Beach!

So, as I was reflecting on my time in India, I decided to upload some of my best India photos on Flickr. These pics are by no means my whole collection of India photos; but, I will certainly be uploading more to this album in the coming weeks.

Enjoy!

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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Good news, everyone! As you may or may not know, in between voiceovers, observing India, and blogging, I’ve also maintained a pretty full freelance writing/editing schedule. The results of those long days and nights last fall have been two guidebooks on Italy that I am quite proud of.
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I apologize for the long silence. In fact, not much has been happening around here. Well, not much except bird flu, temple attacks, and presidential visits. At this point, nearly two years later, India and Bombay have almost become everyday for me. And, sad as it may seem, there comes a time when you become used to (desensitized to?) chaotic driving, street urchins, milk deliverymen on bicycles, unnavigable, paan juice stained sidewalks, piles of burning trash, incense, crowds, poverty, nouveau riche techies, and holy cows. It’s almost time to move on.

That said, I occasionally see things here that I wouldn’t see anywhere else. Take a look at the photo above, taken by a friend of a friend. That’s an actual billboard (called a “hoarding” here) with statistics that aren’t too far-fetched. I don’t know why the designers of the sign used a coffee cup, but there you go.

By the way, as I seem to have run out of words about India, I may start posting some fun photos on occasion. If I put up several at a time, they may even amount to a feature-length article. Figuratively, that is…

Senator John Kerry came to India recently to discuss, among other things, his opinions on outsourcing. During the U.S. elections of 2004, Indians (or at least the Indian media) never quite warmed to Kerry, so I suppose this was a chance for him to go on a goodwill tour and to see outsourcing at its, well, source.

Of course, outsourcing is a very sore subject in the U.S. and its impact has unfortunatley turned some Americans against South Asians. Its short-term effect has meant that many Americans have lost their jobs to workers in India that can do their jobs, if not more efficiently, then more economically. I even have an Indian-American friend whose relative lost her job to an Indian in India!

After being in India for a while, however, I can’t help but be a little touchy when discussing outsourcing with my compatriots at home. The people that I have met here that work at BPOs (Business Process Outsourcing companies) are some of the most diligent, hardworking people. And they aren’t just involved in the telemarketing fields. BPOs such as Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, e-Serve, and Datamatics have stretched their tentacles to cover industries like IT, banking, finance, government, and entertainment. In fact, outsourcing is involved in almost every industry I can think of (which is even more than the average American can think of), so it isn’t going away anytime soon.
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Bombay is one of the most progressive cities in India. For most intents and purposes, both the New York and L.A. of India.

It is also the capital of of Maharashtra, a state that is proving to be more backward which each report of a book ban. On Monday, the Maharashtra government banned a scholarly book by James W. Laine on the life of Shivaji entitled, The Epic of Shivaji. The government had previously banned Laine’s other book, Shivaji: The Hindu King in Islamic India, in January 2004. The latter title is available for purchase here.
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I don’t think I had ever planned my life beyond 2005, so New Year’s 2006 hit me from the out of the blue. We hadn’t made any plans for New Years, either, figuring that something low-key would come along. Ha! This is Bombay. Something came along, but it certainly wasn’t low key.

A friend of a friend of a friend got our gang tickets to the Viren Shah New Year’s Eve party in Worli. I still don’t know who Viren Shah is, other than Page 3 Material, but I’m grateful I was able to show up at his fully-catered bash with free tickets. Nevertheless, it was the epitome of Bombay excess that I have come to despise. (Forgive me for looking a gift horse in the mouth…)
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Another sign that Bombay is booming: it seems like a new club opens each week. Since I arrived over 15 months ago, a number of new clubs, including Zenzi, Seijo and the Soul Dish, and Squeeze have opened in Bandra (north Bombay), the home of the nouveau riche, Bollywood stars, and the majority of Bombay’s decent clubs. Still other clubs, such as Enigma (at the Juhu Marriott), have reopened, cheesier - as I understand - than ever before. South Bombay has even gotten a few hangouts of its own, including the Intercontinental’s Dome, a stylish, white-couched restaurant-cum-lounge on the hotel’s roof with sweeping views of Marine Drive.

Bombay certainly loves its clubs, and the more vapid the better. Like New York or, say, Madrid, most locals prefer to go out as late as possible. The only problem is that many clubs end up shutting down by 1:30 because of assumed or actual police interference. It’s weird - you arrive at midnight and the music stops an hour and a half later. Though I love Bombay, I’ll never consider it a world-class city until it stops living in fear of corrupt cops or Shiv Sena goons.

Anyhow, although I have pretty much outgrown the clubbing urge, I have to get out of the house once in a while. For some reason, I often get questions from people who read this blog about the nightlife scene in Bombay. And, now that New Years is nearing, I thought the time was right to answer them. So, here’s a short run-down of some of Bombay’s clubs. Keep in mind that I am very biased and not easily impressed:
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Bombay has changed to Mumbai. Madras to Chennai. Calcutta to the much less evocative Kolkata. Now, it looks like Bangalore is jumping on the renaming bandwagon. It intends to change its name to Bengaluru, which means “the town of boiled beans” in the local Kannada language.

Is this really necessary?

When a friend sent me the headlines for this story, I thought surely it was a joke concocted by the editors of The Onion. I have no problem with people wanting to get back to their roots, but this whole renaming trend in India comes at a big financial (changing street signs, maps, and tourist materials) - as well as an emotional - cost. Imagine changing New York’s name back to New Amsterdam…

I think Rohinton Mistry summed it up best in a dialogue featured in his novel Such a Long Journey. In this dialogue, two characters are discussing the renaming of Bombay streets and landmarks:
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