Roving Gastronome

Puebla #1: Lucha Libre!

by zora on April 22, 2013

Anyone who has been reading my stuff or following me on Twitter knows that I’m fond of Mexican wrestling. It hits the sweet spot between kitsch and real, folkloric, theatrical performance. I mean, I even loved Nacho Libre.*

The gods of travel scheduling were smiling upon Peter and me, because we happened to be in the city of Puebla on a Monday night, when the weekly lucha action goes down. And it was easy walking distance from our hotel.

Still, we almost didn’t go. We had eaten a very large dinner (surprise, surprise) and were feeling vaguely sunburnt and jet-lagged. Plus, Puebla is 7,217 feet above sea level. I tweeted this pitiful thing:

Fortunately, Rebecca of All About Puebla saw my public near-wimp-out and urged me to go. “It’s so bad, it’s good,” she advised. She didn’t need to explain the appeal to me.

Start time is 9pm, and we rolled up to the Puebla Arena about 9.30–there was a big mob of people, because we were in line for the cheap seats. It was a huge all-ages crowd: families with tiny kids (one baby freaked when her dad put on a wrestling mask; hadn’t learned object permanence yet, obviously), old folks, couples on dates.

That’s me in the pink shirt. (Photo by Peter)

Inside, the arena was medium-size, and slanted very steeply–even four rows from the back, we still had a great view, without the risk of a wrestler actually landing on us. Food and beer vendors threaded through the crowd. One was carrying a huge basket of steamed shrimp, which seems like the most unlikely coliseum snack ever. But people were buying.

I briefly tried to see where we were in the program, and deduce which luchadores we were dealing with.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!! Er, I mean, Monday, Monday, Monday!

That was silly. It didn’t matter. Every match was pure mayhem. There was an old-fashioned bad guy, a man with a huge belly and skinny legs and the old-style skinny-strap unitard, and some new-fangled baddies, all with gnarly-looking black-and-red costumes. Several wrestlers’ masks had mohawks on top. The biggest crowd-pleaser was campy-sweet Maximo, who didn’t wear a mask but did wear pink spangly pants and a blond fauxhawk. He disarmed one opponent by kissing him. Maximo even signed autographs for kids in between matches, which the bad guys didn’t.

Here’s a typical move:

lucha3

(My first animated GIF! I’m so proud.)

After about an hour or so, the show was over, rather suddenly. We were caught a little off guard. We all filed out, past the detritus of the evening.

Man, it's like Spanish tapas bar in here...

Man, it’s like a Spanish tapas bar in here…

Peter said he liked the one we saw in Queens better. Which was, admittedly, more dramatic, and had midget wrestlers and child wrestlers, and a bad guy called La Migra. It lasted for hours.

But here in Puebla, this goes down every week. I realized we’d walked in to one episode of an ongoing soap opera–a tag-team telenovela, I suppose. We left on a cliffhanger. Maximo was up…for now.

Tune in next Monday at the Puebla Arena for more thrilling adventures…

*In Mexico, Nacho Libre totally “counts” as a real Mexican wrestler. You can buy Nacho Libre masks!

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What I’m Reading: Travel Writing, or “Travel Writing”

by zora on April 15, 2013

In the past months, I’ve been casting about for good models of travel writing, in hopes of learning more about how to structure my own book, how to lard it with interesting tidbits without weighing it down, how to tell a story without getting bogged down in details…

Of course once I told myself that I was reading for a purpose, my own crafty mind managed to justify all kinds of seemingly random books. And, in true self-absorbed-grad-student style, suddenly every book seemed like a travel book of some kind, through some magic elastic thinking.

But really, yeah. A journey is a journey is a journey. Here are some of the books I’ve read recently that took me on one.

The City & The City, by China Mieville

So it’s fiction. I suppose you could say all fiction is travel writing, because it takes you somewhere else. But this book is different–it had me ready to hop a plane for Besz (and Ul Qoma).

I can’t say much more about this, except that it’s kind of a detective novel set in one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Read it.

Gun Guys: A Road Trip, by Dan Baum

Dan Baum wrote the wonderful Nine Lives, about New Orleans pre- (and a little post-)Katrina, and this book covers equally “exotic” territory for the typical American-coast-dweller. Baum strikes out for middle America and all those gun lovers you keep reading about. Sneaky thing is, Baum is a gun lover himself, even though he grew up in and around NYC.

The book is more officially about American gun culture, but the travel element is right there in the subtitle, as Baum careens around the country interviewing ballistics-crazed oddballs. Sneaky thing is, Baum is a gun lover himself–even though he’s a skinny Jewish guy from New York, as he points out repeatedly.

Baum–oh, I’ll call him Dan, because I know him–has the gift of gab, and part of the appeal of this book is being able to picture him rolling into assorted gun shops and shooting ranges, trying to talk his way into red-blooded gun culture.

He makes a good travel writer because he walks the line between insider and outsider, explaining without lecturing, and letting the people he meets tell their own stories. And he takes advantage of his role as a traveler, a visitor, to class-surf, from redneck-y shooting ranges up to posh rifle competitions. Which is great, because we could use a lot more analysis of class here in America.

Timbuctoo, by Tahir Shah

First, this is a wonderful physical object, a huge book with an embossed cover and fold-out maps and ribbon bookmarks. And its premise is bizarre and wonderful: the imagined drama behind a real event, when an American man showed up in London claiming to have visited the legendary visit of Timbuktu…back when Europeans still thought the place was built entirely of gold.

Shah writes two travel narratives in one: we all get to voyage back to the pompous hilarity of Regency-era England (where people get all their teeth yanked out because it was the fashion, apparently?), while Robert Adams (the American) tells his story of being hauled hither and yon through the Sahara as a slave.

Oh, third possible travel thread: Shah has hidden a golden treasure somewhere in the world, and the clues to its location (and a substantial prize) are in the book. Get cracking!

International Bank of Bob, by Bob Harris

A wise investment[/caption]This is a ridiculously heartwarming book. Bob Harris had an epiphany about world inequity while on travel-writing assignment in Dubai, and proceeded to dump all his spare cash into microloans at Kiva. And then he went around the world visiting microloan recipients, to see how/if it all worked.

You got yer exotic locales. You got yer innovative ideas. You got yer wisecracking-but-super-nice-guy author. It’s a pretty solid combination. Although even I, who firmly believes the world is full of kind people, got slightly overloaded on all the sweetness and positivity. Which Harris warns of in the introduction, and makes no apology for.

I’ve faced the same problem writing about my travels. Nothing bad has happened! I’ve done stupid things and talked to everyone, and it all turned out totally fine. Travel writing ideally should instruct and nudge without seeming to, I think. But Harris actively decided not to be subtle, and just wrote a book to convince Americans the world is a great place. And I’m glad he did.

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Irish Coffee: The Winter Writer’s Choice

by zora on March 11, 2013

Phew. Went off the radar there for a while. Much of January and February was spent writing a draft of my book (I guess it’s safe to call it by its name now), The Crimson Sofa.

It got a little hairy at the end. After weeks of wrestling with the structure of the Morocco section (so many tiny details Morocco has!), I read a New Yorker story by John McPhee about his various strategies of organizing his stories. That provoked this:

If you see a theme here that I’m not seeing, let me know, OK? I mean, a theme besides mentally disturbed.

It didn’t really work. The draft I turned in frayed at the end like a faulty piece of rope from which our hero has already plunged to his death. I’m trusting the solution will come to me.

So I took a break. I went to Santa Cruz and the Bay Area, where I savored a fine Irish coffee at Brennan’s in Berkeley.

The nice thing about San Francisco is that Irish coffee is a year-round drink, not just a St. Patrick’s Day thing. This is likely due to the climate and lack of central heating. Irish coffee warms the insides when you need it most–like, say, July.

My father, Patrick O’Neill (so right there you know he’s qualified to judge), has strong opinions about Irish coffee.

First of all, the glass has to be just right: tapered, so the cream stays in an even layer as you drink to the bottom.

Brennan’s honcho says: These glasses were historically used for flips, before being adopted for Irish coffee.

After a scare, they are now available again from Libbey, even retail. (Before, you had to buy them in cases of 36, which is how I came to have 24 and my father has 12.)

Then, the coffee has to be strong. And the sugar goes in the coffee, not in the cream.

Sugar Duck approves of the Irish coffee recipe.

And the cream has to be thick, but not whipped stiff.

Brennan’s understands all this. The rest of the world does not always, and will sling you all kinds of crap (the world does this a lot; be vigilant).

So, in honor of St. Patrick, and my father Patrick, and what the heck, a book that’s still as drafty as a San Francisco Victorian…make yourself an Irish coffee today.

Mmm, creamy.

Irish Coffee, the Astoria Way
Don’t balk at the sugar. It helps support the cream on top.

For each glass:
1 tsp sugar
Glug Irish whiskey
1 tsp Greek Nescafe (or any euro-brand instant espresso)**
Heavy cream, whipped till thick

Pour boiling water in the glasses to heat them up while you get everything ready.

Rinse out each glass, add your sugar, whiskey and Nescafe, then fill with hot water till about a quarter inch below the rim. Gently spoon on the cream.

**OK, fine, if you don’t want to use Nescafe, then brew strong, un-fancy coffee (no top notes of grapefruit or leather or whatever) and fill the glass 2:1 coffee:whiskey, leaving about quarter inch at the top for cream.

Irish Coffee, the Brennan’s Way
Here’s Brennan’s advice, in video form. Watch it for the excellent justification of the use of non-fancy coffee.

And don’t fret about the manufacturing cream: its main asset (aside from being extra-creamy) is that it holds its peaks longer than regular cream. But you’re not running a bar where you need to keep the cream whipped all day. Are you?

Breakfast of champions.

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2012: The Year in “Wow, that happened?”

by zora on January 3, 2013

Ah, the year-end recap. Some silly things, some momentous things–and not just a rehash of old blog posts. Genuine new material here.

1. We got a pet.
Well, not really. But we did get Sugar Duck, a very easily anthropomorphized sugar canister from Turkey. He speaks with a lisp, and sounds sweet, but sometimes he can be a bit snippy. Peter and I are rapidly progressing toward being one of those awful couples who only talk to each other via hand puppets.

After a couple of months, Sugar Duck also got a friend from the homeland, Mr. Turkish Teapots!

2. I made Saveur!
Well, really, the excellent restaurant The Curious Kumquat made Saveur, as #39 in the Saveur 100. It just happened to be my name at the end.

3. I got a cover story in a magazine, and I won an award.
Please indulge my career brags briefly. I was moving too fast this year to fully appreciate these things at the time. Typing it now, I feel kinda bad-ass.

Both were via New Mexico magazine, where I’m always honored to be published. The cover story was this roundup of cool hotels in my home state, in the October ’12 issue.

And the award was from the International Regional Magazine Association, for the feature I wrote in 2011 about taking the train to Las Vegas, NM [PDF].

The best awards are the ones you didn’t even know you were up for. A Macarthur is next, right?

4. I traveled alone throughout the Middle East, and I did not die.
Back in February, I was quoted in a story about how Americans were still traveling to the Middle East.

A reader felt compelled to warn me of my foolhardiness:

Hi,
I know you feel travel to the Arab nations is safe, but you need to appreciate is how fast the situation over there can change and as an American you are a symbol of hate at the moment.

We had the student hiker’s capture, when the USA has plenty of Mountains to climb.

We have the Aid workers freed by the Navy Seals in Somalia; BTW I think 10 Somalia’s were killed. So sad considering the Aid workers could be doing aid work in plenty of places right here in the USA.

Please don’t promote the middle east until women in Saudi Arabia can drive and vote. Or until women can choose their own husband.

[redacted]

Er.

Anyway, “the Arab nations” (I can’t vouch for Iran or Somalia) I visited this year are safe. I even picked up hitchhikers in Abu Dhabi.

The UAE is unintentionally hilarious; Doha is delicious; Lebanon has great hiking; Morocco is full of sweet people.

Actually, everywhere is. I don’t think [redacted] appreciates this, and I feel sad for him.

5. I took up a sport.
If you consider hula hooping a sport. It’s certainly more of a workout than I usually get, a bit of a break from my couch-and-bonbons schedule. And, remarkably, it is the only physical activity I have ever been reasonably good at on first attempt.

6. I made friends in Arabic.
For all my years studying Arabic, I have never actually gotten to know someone in the Mid East purely by speaking in that language. That has a lot to do with studying at fancier schools in Egypt, where most people speak English as a second language.

This year, I went to more French-as-backup countries, and my French sucks. And those countries also happen to have some charming and outgoing–and patient–women I’m honored to have met.

7. I went back to Morocco with my parents.
They spent a lot of time there in the late ’60s, which is why I have the name I have. I also finally figured out what my name is really supposed to be in Arabic.

My dad sat down here and said sardonically, “Ah, mint tea again at Cafe Central in Tangier. I can die a happy man.” Then the waiter told me he loved the delicious ladies. Just another typical travel day.

All the details will be in the book.

(Oh, sh*t! The book! Why am I writing this blog post when I should be writing the book?!)

8. I turned 40.
And I feel pretty good about it. Even though I almost immediately had to have my wisdom teeth pulled. Life is so much easier at 40 than at 20. And so is traveling.

9. I might have just hit my limit with traveling.
I hope this isn’t related to the previous point. But it was a long year. As I’m writing this, I should have been on a plane to Kuala Lumpur. But general tiredness and a creeping sense of responsibility made me stay home. What’s happening?!

I do have a book to write (ack, sh*t!), and that requires sitting still. I’m a little behind schedule. After this post, you might not hear from me for another month or so.

(The book, in case you’re new here, has a lot to do with “the Arab nations”–and how they’re a great place to travel.)

******

I dedicate 2012 to all the wonderful people I met on my adventures: Maala, Btissam, Said, Alaa, Mido and family (oh, that was late 2011–but still!), Agnes, Holly, Arva, the women behind Qatar Swalif, Habooba, the Asrani family, and many, many more.

May your 2013 be filled with nourishing food and kind strangers.