Real Mail Week, Part 2: Hemingway, Che, and a Bagpiper Go Into a Post Office ...

It's International Real Mail Week! I decreed it so, even if I'm the only one observing it (I sent letters to 104 heads of state, but they all must've gotten lost in the mail ... which is mighty ironic, if you think about it). Yesterday was all about the epic Pantone Postcard Conspiracy that has been filling my mailbox for over a year. 

Today: More postcards. Here are some of my favorites, as many as would fit onto my coffee table (about a third to half of the cards I've received since the last postcard gallery update). 

Click for larger version.

Now, the main reason I love postcards is that they're art plus narrative in one compact package that you can hold, feel, put on your refrigerator, or arrange on your coffee table. Beyond that, though--and I'm gonna get all writer-nerd on you here--I also love how they force you to tell a story succinctly and even give you a writing prompt on the other side. I particularly enjoy sending postcards from places OTHER than what's on the front, and then tying that image into my commentary on the real things I'm seeing around me. But then, I'm weird.

Real Mail Week, Part 1: What It Looks Like When You Get 116 Color-Coordinated Postcards

Be careful what you wish for. You may be an aficionado of old-school mail, for example, but if you publicly proclaim yourself as such, and ask people to write to you, well ... 

They will.

That's only a fraction of the correspondence. Specifically, the fraction representing the number that will fit on my coffee table for photo-documentation purposes. I'm gonna need a bigger coffee table.

You people. You impress me. Your letters. Postcards. Homemade aerograms with elaborate collages. Correspondence from every continent except for the one covered in ice, which is considerably trickier in every way, and I'm not even sure if it's possible for people to send postcards from there (and my book hasn't yet been translated into Penguin, so none of them have written to me yet).

As for my own impressiveness ... well, it doesn't measure up, I'm afraid. I'm way behind in my correspondence--and "way" in this case means, oh, "In some cases more than a year." I'll just repeat that for purposes of full public shaming: Over. A. Year. Behind. I'm sorry. Really. Truly. Sure, I've got excuses. Which one do you want? I've been beyond busy. Had a book published. Went on book tour. Was a guest speaker on a big ol' ship for four weeks. Got more assignments, which I had to juggle with my day job. Moved. Planned a wedding and then, last month, got married to an amazing, wonderful woman (our vows were adapted from our early love letters to each other; she's also a fan of old-school correspondence). (Wedding pic below, BTW.) 

But still. I've been remiss. So this week, I'm catching up, at long last. I'm putting pen to paper and writing back. And I'm also putting pixels to ... well, pixels, as I also finally catch up on posting photos of some of the highlights of your correspondence. 

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Today: The Great Pantone Conspiracy

As noted previously, shortly after I put out the call for correspondence, a couple of years ago now, I started getting Pantone postcards--that is, postcards that looked like giant swatches from the color company Pantone. To date, I have received at least 116 such postcards, from strangers and family and long-lost friends, from Indonesia and Switzerland and Morocco and Chile and Cuba (!) and other places near and far.

The pace has slowed down since the early days of the Pantone Conspiracy, but they keep trickling in--as you'll see, I got two more yesterday.

So here is what 116 postcards look like: 

Except, wait, right after I took that photo, I looked on the floor and saw that I forgot a few:

Hello, Taiwan! (Or: How Do You Say "Book Launch, Woohoo!!" in Chinese?)

This officially debuts on August 1st:

The Taiwan edition of Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day-- make that 我用50年前的旅遊指南玩歐洲. I'm very excited.

The book was translated into traditional Chinese by Ting Wai-min, to whom I owe a sincere apology for words I just made up, as in the sentence "I am, as the Dutch say, kindofaneuroticintrovert." 

I tried plugging that into Google Translate just now, English to Chinese, and it came back with this: kindofaneuroticintrovert. So that's helpful.

I'm also sorry, Ting Wai-min, for "grimetastic," which Google Translate renders as 污垢TASTIC的

Travels With Duct Tape: Innovative On-the-Road Uses For Life's Greatest Tool

I’ve heard it said that all a toolbox really needs is duct tape and WD-40. If it doesn’t move but it should, use the WD-40; if it does move but it shouldn’t, use the tape.

Duct tape is particularly useful for travelers--like all good travel gear, it does double-duty. Actually, it does way more than that. Here are some ways I’ve seen it used, plus a couple that I just might try on my next trip.

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1. The Patch 

The most common use among travelers is undoubtedly as a patch--on bags, shoes, and clothing.

It also works as a decoration: my mom has several long pieces of blue tape on her suitcase, which I assumed was to fix a hole until she told me it was just to help her spot it on the baggage carousel at the airport.

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2. A + B = Awesome

Second most common use: affixing Item A to Item B, even if they don’t obviously go together. I once saw a guy in a hostel lounge making his own headlamp with a baseball cap, a small flashlight, and a roll of tape.

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3. Laundry Time

Come laundry day, there are all kinds of uses, particularly as a sink plug, lint roller/light dirt remover (you’re on your own for the stains, though), and clothesline (but not, alas, clothespins).

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4. Drink Up

In college, one of my roommates made a cup out of duct tape. It wasn’t very stable when he put it down, but otherwise it worked surprisingly well.

But why stop there? For someone with a bit of ambition and time on his or her hands, duct tape can serve other travel needs. Like . . .

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5. Lookin' Slick

How about a duct tape tie? I’m not really a dress-up guy, but it seems like every trip there’s a time when I wish I had something just a bit fancier to wear. It bet it’d look great, at least from a distance. A long distance.

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6. Rest Easy (and Sticky)

Or, for the really ambitious . . .

Hostel bed not up to your standards? Stranded in the jungle? No worries--just make a duct tape hammock! (May require way more duct tape than you actually have.)

Enrichment Voyage, Part 15: Nativity Scenes, Zip-Lining, and the Strange Juxtapositions of Travel

Hello? Is this thing still on? 

So ... Certain readers will have noticed that I never quite finished telling the tale of the Enrichment Voyage last winter. Life got in the way. But that doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of stories from that wondrous, strange journey that was most definitely not a cruise. You can catch up on the previous Enrichment Voyage posts over here. Or, if you prefer, you can also start from the top and read all the stories, oldest to newest, in one long post.

I'll keep posting Enrichment Voyage stories here and there, I promise. For now, here's something to keep the narrative thread going, albeit slowly and slightly. 

This is a post I wrote for Enrichment Voyage's very own blog. I think it pretty well sums up the overall experience. 

Large structure: Fortaleza Real Felipe, Callao, Peru.
Small structure: Nativity scene

One of the great joys of travel is the strange combinations and juxtapositions it creates. High culture meets low, foreign meets familiar, and even the most commonplace tableaux take on a new surrealism when paired in unexpected ways.

It is not terribly remarkable when I tell you that I saw many elaborate, handmade nativity scenes in Peru, the exact sort of large-ish but not quite life-size creches that you might expect to see on church lawns back home in the states.

It’s a lot more interesting when I tell you that I saw one such large display — roughly four feet by four feet by four feet, featuring all the expected characters, plus blinking lights and Christmas carols rendered in electronic bleating from unseen speakers — behind the counter of a post office.

The Real Me: Notes on dating in the Google era

Wrote a story for The Morning News about online courtship and the persistence of personal histories on the internet (for better or for worse). Here's how it begins:

Certain questions answer themselves. Like when a message appears in your email inbox from a romantic interest who you’ve barely met, whose full name you don’t yet know, and to whom, come to think of it, you’ve never given your email address—a message with a subject line reading, “Is this stalking?”

Read the rest at The Morning News.

And, holy crap, the story got some link love from The Dish, one of my own must-read blogs. That made my day.

For readers who got here via The Morning News or The Dish or are otherwise new here: Hello. Thanks very much for stopping by. Also sort of amusing: judging from the web stats, plenty of you have also taken the time to figure out Maren's last name (never mentioned in the story) and google her and find HER website. Which is kinda awesome, kinda creepy, in keeping with the essay's themes.

Anyway. Please take a few minutes to look around and read some other stuff, will you? There's ...

• This blog, which I'm not very good about updating, although I hope still you'll subscribe or at least check now and then for stories from here and there. Right now, I'm partway through an extended series of posts from an Enrichment Voyage 
• A book I wrote last year, Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day (Perigee Books/Penguin), which recounts my attempt to tour Europe using only a 1963 guidebook. Part offbeat travel memoir, part social history of the beaten path. A National Geographic Traveler Book of the Month. Available at IndieBound, Amazon, B&N, or my favorite indie stores.
• Or just keep it short and sweet and read one of my own personal favorites of the things I've written, an essay for World Hum called "Seven Travel Rules From a Brooding Teenager."

Cheers.

Bookiversary: A Year In The Life Of An Author, By The Numbers

We interrupt Enrichment Voyage programming for a brief message: Today is Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day's bookiversary! That's totally a word. I know because I just made it up. 

A year ago today, nearly 200 people crammed into a subterranean bar in Nordeast Minneapolis to help me launch the book. The twelve months that ensued were equally as frenetic, nerve-wracking, wonderful, weird, and cocktail-fueled (make mine an Old Fashioned, please).

Some selected highlights, lowlights, and weird-lights, by the numbers:

• Honors I still kinda can’t believe actually happened, and make me grin like you wouldn’t believe: National Geographic Traveler Book of the Month and being a guest speakeron a cruise ship, along with, um, Sandra Day O’Connor and other Genuinely Accomplished People.
• Overall talks/readings/signings: 17 (I think?)
• Number at (or presented by) indie bookstores: 8
• Number at cooking stores: 1 (the excellent Hill's Kitchen in Washington, DC)
• Number at which I gave an old-school slide show (you know, with an old-school slide projector): 4
• Number given with a cocktail in my hand: 1
• Type of cocktail and person who first introduced me to it: Caipirinha; Lee, obviously (in Europe)
• Number given on a cruise ship (as noted above): 5
• Overlap between cocktail-in-hand and cruise ship presentations: 100%
• Oddest encounter during a book tour event: the biker guy at the TV station in Seattle, who swore up and down that he had just videotaped "a mother sasquatch nursing a baby" and they needed to put it on the air right now.  
• Place where I got the best audience questions: my old high school (true story)
• Silliest question at a reading: “Can you recommend a guidebook for Paris?” (This after I had just spent half an hour talking about how I’d visited the Continent—for the first and only time—with a 1963 guide, making me really not the right person to ask this question.)
• Question I frankly am sick of answering: “What’s your favorite city?”
• Percentage of readings (and interviews) where someone asked this: 85%
• What I do when this happens: Smile and reply with whatever city sounds good at the moment, but the truth is it really depends on my mood and a ton of other factors, as described here.
• Postcards and Commentary Track Bookmarks given away: Probably around 200
• Interviews for and/or stories in foreign media: 4
• Coolest story about that: My mom was traveling in Europe shortly after Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper ran an interview with me. During casual conversation with the guy sitting next to her on the airplane, she mentioned my book and he said, “Oh, I just read about him when I was in Germany!”
• Foreign media requests turned down, with regrets: 1, because, alas, if I tried to do a live radio interview in German, I would sound like a less coherent, less sophisticated Dumbass American version of the Swedish Chef.
• Times I have checked my Amazon Sales Rank: Um. Like mumble-mumble-trillion.
• Current Sales Rank: (Sigh.)
• Amount of the Amazon book page URL that I have to type into my browser before it auto-completes the rest: A
• Book clubs directly interrogated by: 2
• Book clubs that live-tweeted at least a portion of their own discussion (and tagged me in their tweets): 2
• Book clubs where someone brought chocolate croissants to the their discussion: 1
• Site of the above book club: National Geographic HQ (!!)
• Emails from readers who used Europe on Five Dollars a Day themselves, in the 1960s: 20 or so
• Emails from readers who used Europe on Five Dollars a Day themselves, in the 2000s: 1
• Emails from  1960s travelers who asked me to check my book for old-school hotel information she’d been wondering about for years: 1
• Letters, postcards, or packages from readers: Oh, man. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Turns out there are a ton of other people who like old-school mail. (Ahem: PO Box 1922,  Minneapolis, MN 55458-1922)
• Coolest package contents: a fresh packet of the Big Boy Bail Bonds pens that Lee planned to use to ward off Belgian thugs (please see page 105, where you will note that I erroneously called the company “Bad Boy Bail Bonds,” an egregious error for which I sincerely apologize).
• Speed with which I have replied to various correspondents: Approximately the same as continental drift
• Level of guilt I feel for the above: Immense
• Assurance I will make: It’s coming. For real. I promise.
• Most polarizing chapter: Venice
• Profanity-laced caps-heavy emails from readers who cannot BELIEVE that I would say anything positive about that VILE Paris place or anything sarcastic about that TRANSCENDENTLY WONDERFUL Venice place: 1
• A brief comment to this and the other (very few but vocal) persons who were taken aback my brooding in said chapter: It’s really about travel fatigue, not gratuitous dissing of a city that, I now understand, you daydream about on an hourly basis.
• Answer to the inevitable question about The Next Book: Workin’ on it. I have an idea; my agent likes it; I need to get started on the proposal.

Parting words to everyone who has read the book, bought it, recommended it, etc.: Thank you all. So much.