Zora O'Neill's Blog, page 3

Addis Ababa, Roughly

When Peter and I got on the plane to Addis Ababa, we were giddy about every little thing. They were playing Ethiopian music! And the safety cards were in Ethiopian letters!

OK, technically Amharic, but you know what I mean.

We truly had no idea what to expect when we arrived.

We certainly didn’t expect to arrive in what was, to my eyes, Cairo twenty years ago. The airport lighting was that old-fluorescent dim. The springs in the seat of our taxi were sprung just exactly like all the taxi seats I’d known in Cairo in 1992, so that they felt a bit molest-y, but also sad. The air even smelled the same: dusty, smoggy, desert-like, even in the cold.

After we arrived at our hotel, we took a quick spin through the surrounding blocks. It was Christmas day (Ethiopian Calendar), and while that had meant near silence at the airport, around our hotel, it meant the streets thronged with drunken party people.

Mere steps outside of the hotel gate, we were accosted by a gang of four dudes who claimed to be students, and who at various points claimed not to know one another, and then yes, know some of the other guys, and then that they just wanted to have a drink and talk because it was Christmas.

This too reminded me of Cairo twenty years ago–not because Cairo no longer has charming street hustlers who want to chat you up, but because I haven’t been particularly bothered by them in twenty years.

When I wrote the Cairo chapter of the Lonely Planet Egypt guide in 2007, I took it as my chance to pour out all my love for Cairo onto the page. To help the first-time visitor take a short-cut to loving the place the way I did, maybe in a few days, instead of a few months (or never, as happens with the majority of tourists). Don’t worry, I said, basically–just relax and enjoy the chaos. People are basically nice–don’t lose sight of that.

But going to Addis was a good reminder–some might say, ah, a reality check for the blithe travel writer–of just how overwhelming a whole new rough-and-tumble city can be, one where you are very, very obviously a tourist.

I couldn’t read the signs. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t yet know where I was on a map, and it was dark, and half-dressed street people were sleeping in the shadows, and I didn’t know how much a beer cost, and hadn’t had time to inspect the money (only enough to notice that the bills all smell like Ethiopian food, from being passed from spicy-buttered hand to spicy-buttered hand). I was out of my depth in a way I had not been in a very, very long time. I couldn’t even blame jet lag, because we’d just flown a few hours, from Kigali.

I knew these faux-students were probably no more than a nuisance, but I could not see past my own discomfort to see how it might be informative and interesting to talk to them anyway–as I had cheerfully advised people to do in the Egypt guide. We bought the guys one round of beers (in a bar strewn with hay, to mark the festive Christmas day), and stomped back to the hotel in a mild, exhausted huff.

Daylight was better. Then I could get my bearings a bit. The corner where we’d gotten press-ganged the night before was now the site of different traffic.

In 1992, camels were often driven straight through the center of Cairo and over the bridge to the west bank of the Nile.

I could walk slowly, and look at architectural details–Greek- and Armenian-style architecture in the blocks around our hotel.

Hundred-year-old balconies, roughly.

And soon I was noticing even smaller, stranger details. Like the propensity for all the male mannequins to be so…bulging.

Is that a rolled-up sock in your pocket or…? Oh, yeah. I guess it is.

In a few more hours, I felt my equilibrium somewhat restored. It wasn’t that the sketchy aspects of Addis had gone. Plenty of people stared, and followed, and a street kid yoinked Rod’s cell phone (but he got it back).

Behind the rock wall was someone’s sleeping nest.

I found myself wondering about Cairo. When I was there in 2011, it seemed cleaner than I remembered, not so filled with beggars, and the hassle is somewhat less. But how much of that was due just to my perception? To my learned ability to screen out the worst, while also seeing (and knowing) the best in Cairenes? That’s what getting comfortable in any new place requires.

We were only in Addis a few days, but even in that short time, I was able to agree with what our guidebook (Bradt) said about the city: “Its bark is worse than its bite,” the author assured us. Which is a gracious way of saying, “Just relax and enjoy the chaos.”

Thus endeth the lesson. A few more photos:

Crossing the bridge by the ex-railway station.

Italians were here.

Where the Chinese are building a metro. For now, a pleasant (but dusty, and full of holes and rubble) pedestrian boulevard.

Italians again? Who can say.

Spare chairs stacked up in a stairwell at Addis Ababa U., like some kind of art installation.

More chairs.

I have no idea either.

Taking the long view.

The Sugar King of Rwanda

Before we leave Rwanda, and while we’re still on the subject of material culture, let me just mention how nice it is that you can get intensely gingery tea with milk pretty much anywhere there.

For instance, at the edge of a national park:

Please note Heineken umbrella, and waiter in Heineken shirt. On the edge of Nyungwe Forest, about a thousand square kilometers of wilderness. Just the drive up to this entrance gate, and the grassy lawn, was a couple of hours of winding-through-nothing.

This bridge was why we went. But I was too terrified to take a photo from the middle of it.

To give you an idea of the scope of things:

(Yes, that’s an earthworm.)

Anyway, after you’ve hiked out to the wobbly cable bridge, and you’ve survived crossing it, by breathing deep, clutching the wires and chanting “science, science, science” all the way across (because it constantly feels as if it’s going to flip over, but of course, physically, it cannot), well, then you want some restorative “African tea,” as that ginger-milk-tea mix is called.

Everywhere in Rwanda, when you order tea, you get your own giant thermos of it, which is very nice. You also get a large bowl of sugar. And, here on the edge of the forest, we got…the Sugar King!

When our Heineken-shirted waiter brought him over on a tray, Peter and I both started pointing and laughing and taking a million pictures. Which no one really understood.

Regular readers of this blog may know, but this is because we have a particularly characterful sugar dispenser, Sugar Duck.

The Sugar King of Rwanda is flanked at all times by his loyal bodyguards. They are especially good at silencing the crowds when the Sugar King issues his royal proclamations.

Peter was a most loyal subject, obeying (under the enforcing glare of a bodyguard) the ruler’s decree that every cup of African tea should have not one scoop of sugar, and not two scoops…but three!

I doubt Sugar Duck even knows that his true overlord holds court on the edge of the Nyungwe Forest. He may be hurt at first by Peter’s defection, but I think he’ll understand in the end. If he wants to make a pilgrimage there, to pay his respects, we’ll take him. We might even go hiking again.

(The cable bridge is very cool! We saw tiny little sunbirds and great blue turacos. There are several other, longer day hikes you can take from this entrance gate, where you might see some other wildlife–aside from earthworms and anthropomorphized sugar bowls. If you go, you have to leave Butare at dawn, as the hikes leave at scheduled times in the mid-morning.)

Nyamirambo Women’s Centre Tour

There’s a great little organization in Kigali, the Nyamirambo Women’s Centre. It’s a work co-op and educational group, teaching women job skills. They run a fun walking tour around their neighborhood, which ends with lunch–which happened to be some of the best food we had in Rwanda.

I highly recommend this! To tantalize you, here are some pics.

Nyamirambo is known as the Muslim part of town, though it’s really quite mixed.

It’s also known as the place to get your car detailed, and, if you’re a moto-taxi driver, where to get your regulation green helmets.

First we visited the market. Men pounding things that women should be pounding: always funny.

Also in the market, a crew of ladies was ready for all our sewing needs. If only I’d brought my other pants! They are still held together with a safety pin.

Nyamirambo is also known for its hair salons. I got a big long braid put in.

We stopped in an herbal medicine shop. Like pretty much everything in Rwanda, it was very organized and licensed by the government.

A great deal of Kigali is still dirt roads.

One of our guides helped us pick out passion fruit and avocadoes, because we needed one last fix before we left town.

Our delicious lunch in process–just mixing up the ukali, the corn-flour pudding, in the outdoor “kitchen.”

Our wonderfully satisfying meal, clockwise from upper left: plantains stewed with onion, tomato and celery; sumptuous potatoes with green peppers; red beans I wish I’d asked more about; the ukali, the corn-flour pudding, that is cut into wedges; and dodo, callaloo with, in this case, peanuts, dried sardines, green eggplants and celery.

Passion fruit are on prominent display in this pic because our guide Marie Aimee (who runs the organization) taught us how to eat them without a knife and spoon–a life-changing skill.

(FYI on the passion fruit: You just bite off the end of it, and suck the insides out! Of course, you should wash the fruit first. It’s all so obvious now–and to think how many years I wasted fussing with them…)

Thanks for everything, ladies!

Rwanda, Really

To be honest, I’m still trying to sort out all the threads of our trip to Rwanda. We were there only a week, but we saw a lot, had a lot of interesting conversations, and left feeling as though we could come back for twice as long.

So this post is mostly a photo dump, just to let you know what it looks like. Which I didn’t really know. I mean, yes: green, hills, etc.

But then, of course, that’s all overlaid with mental images from the genocide in 1994. What does Rwanda look like now that it’s East Africa’s rising star? Now that the economy is booming and everyone’s praising the place for its potential and verve (and American-friendliness)?

In short, what does an African country look like when it’s not in the news, for some disaster or other?

Well, first of all, Rwanda looks clean. Like, the cleanest place I’ve ever been. Cleaner than Scandinavia.

They have a ban on plastic bags. They take them away from you at the airport!

Our friend Eric on the right, tolerating our plastic-bag-ban fascination

There’s also a monthly community-service day whern everyone picks up litter. Eric, in the photo above, is a police officer who was off-duty when he was driving us around–and only went “on” once, when someone on a bus threw a plastic bottle out the window. (Not that he was ignoring other things–Rwanda has a very low crime rate.)

This is Kigali’s downtown skyline.

Yup, that’s about it.

The city is very hilly and very green.

Cool retaining walls–click to see the little plants set in them. Moto taxis (like the motorcycle at the top) are the norm; helmets required for driver and passenger.

The roads all curve and loop around, so we pretty much never managed to orient ourselves. “This is where we saw the guy with the mattresses, right?” I said at one point.

You can’t see the guy, because he’s carrying them.

Eric was fantastic, because he understood immediately what we did and didn’t want to see. That is, after we explained what “fancy” meant, and how we didn’t like it. So he took us to what he called “a typical East African bar.”

Roasted goat leg, greens and corn pudding (ukali) were on the menu.

The open courtyard at the bar. Note the faux-bois columns on the right. There is a lot of faux-bois in Rwanda.

I wouldn’t have even thought that was a category of bar, but I’m glad I know now. Car Wash Grill & Sports Bar, Kigali. Make a note of it.

We drove out of the city on a couple of trips. There are a lot of people walking.

Like this jaunty man.

But the roads are built with extra-wide shoulders, so people have a place to walk–good planning.

Houses are tidy, with new metal roofs or older tile ones. No one lives in a grass hut anymore, said our host, Rogers. “But they can have them for leisure,” he said.

There isn’t indoor plumbing everywhere, but the government is installing public water points all the time. Every restaurant we went to had a hand-washing station.

Handy. (Har.)

That was good, because we ate a lot. I think I might’ve spent the entire week with a piece of goat meat wedged between two molars. But it was so good, I didn’t care.

So good, we ate here twice.

That’s Chez Ramadhan, in Nyanza, the town where the old royal palace is. Make a note of it.

Passion fruit was in season. We had it for breakfast every morning!

Our lovely Saran-wrapped breakfast, ready for pre-dawn departure.

Tree tomatoes were also in season. That’s one of those fruits I’ve seen in the frozen-pulp-bricks-from-Colombia format in our grocery store, but never really understood. But it’s simple–they’re tomatoey, and they grow on trees. Not bad. But can’t compete with passion fruit.

We had some killer ice cream. As we walked up, a guy was toting a fresh can of milk into the shop. It came from a soft-serve machine, but it tasted like the barnyard, in the best way.

Mmm, peanuts.

Speaking of the barnyard: We saw the Ankole cattle at the old royal palace. They are not kidding around.

The cow-tender proceeded to sing a lovely song to this cow, while brushing the flies from its face.

Wikipedia tells me cattle domestication started in the fertile crescent, then spread to Africa. From the way this particular cow was still being tended, I certainly would’ve thought Africa was the original land of milk. There’s lots of locally made cheese and yogurt and other dairy products.

Gouda at the grocery store

The food in Rwanda was simple, but so good and fresh, it started to make me a little nervous. Like, you know it can only go downhill from here. There are so many NGOs crawling over this country, and you know American ag dudes are hustling their boring-tasting, unsuitable stuff there.

Holsteins on the money–a sign of the future. Not sure how those laptops are working out…

That’s all very nice, I can tell you’re thinking, but, but…what about the genocide?!

I know. It’s strange. It was only twenty years ago. It hasn’t been swept under the rug at all–there’s a museum and a memorial in Kigali, and a thousand other memorials around the country. Trials are ongoing. It’s a serious topic, but not hush-hush. The people we were with talked about it voluntarily (though their families were genocidees, not -ers, and they had served in the army that ended the genocide, which is an empowering position from which to look at history).

After being in the weird tension of Beirut, where everyone pretends the past is done with yet sharpens their knives at night, Rwanda was a flat-out relief. Even inspiring.

Yet, it still alarmed me to see this:

Looks like a Nike swoosh at first…

That Rwandese can, presumably, look at that bar of soap without flinching is still a little boggling to me. But I have lived through so little, and pretty much everyone in that country over the age of twenty has lived through too much.

The other side of the soap

And though it remains to be seen whether there will be a peaceful transfer of power after Kagame, for now I have to give him credit, because Rwanda looks great.

Cheers from the eastern shore of Lake Kivu!

Itegue Taitu Hotel, Addis Ababa

I just saw The Grand Budapest Hotel this weekend, and I came away with such a swoony fever over that fabulous time-warp of a place (the weird, dying 1968 hotel, not the one in the 1930s) that I’m putting off the Rwanda posts I had planned so I can tell you about the fantastico Itegue Taitu Hotel, where I stayed in January.

As I’ve written before, I have a bit of a thing for what I call “vintage hotels” (also, on occasion, motels). I’m always looking for new ones, and the Itegue Taitu was especially delightful.

Apparently, there are some new wings. You don’t want those. You want the original building–built in 1898 (Ethiopian Calendar, which I think means early 1900s), as if I have to tell you.

After spinning through the original revolving door, Peter and I practically skipped and clapped all through the lobby and dining room and upstairs. The stairs creaked! The wall sconces glowed just right! The rooms were weirdly large and erratically furnished!

(Vintage hotel rule: Ideally, there will be no TV. But if there is one, it must always look uncomfortable and out of place.)

So, some of the old wardrobes were a little chipped. And the bathtubs a bit worn. But how many things get chucked out, only for the crime showing a bit of age? What is our mania for new and untouched? You can’t really believe no one has slept in a hotel room before you. I’d rather see this somewhat worn honesty, rather than false sterility.

I could not convince Peter that the painting was hung sideways. I imagine many hotel paintings could be improved by rotating them 90 degrees.

Guests receive the English-language paper, because its guests are so worldly, I suppose (even though the Addis English paper is perhaps not as fine as it once was). You are welcome to read in the central lounge.

The place is filled with paintings, some old and some new. This is Queen Teitu herself, adding some elegance to what is otherwise a rather ungracious reception room around the corner of the building. (The real reception area has been turned into a gift shop.)

And this fabulous one was on the stairs. Please note the actual silver glitter and sequins.

But our hearts really fell right out when we came downstairs for dinner. The tables were full, the waiters were bustling about in ill-fitting uniforms, and the piano player was at it.

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This, though it is so distinctly Ethiopian, could be the soundtrack of all vintage hotels.

Back in the Saddle…Rwanda and beyond

Ahhh, that was a nice little hiatus. Thanks for bearing with me. I know you were drumming your fingers impatiently on your desk all this time. While I hopped around to four different countries and completely wore myself out.

First, Peter and I went to Rwanda. As you do.

But really: Peter and I met a Rwandan (or Rwandese, as they say there) police officer a few years ago, and he invited us to visit. We figured we had better go before he forgot who we were. We also rounded up Rod, whom some of you may remember as our exceptionally great and extroverted travel partner on previous adventures.

It was my first visit to not-North Africa, and I can’t recommend the place highly enough. FWIW, Peter and Rod had been to Kenya before; they both liked Rwanda more. Which, I know, it’s not a contest. But in terms of traveling logistics and concerns, Rwanda has its act together: secure, clean and tasty food.

Don’t go to Rwanda if you’re a penny-pinching backpacker, though. Hotels in Kigali are pricey (we paid $50 for a private room at the hostel; everything else was $70+) and getting around by bus might be tricky. (We got escorted around in a car, which is just not like us.)

Another hotel we stayed in in Kigali one night. Peter and I got put in the penthouse suite–whee!

And, let’s be honest, Rwanda is not looking for backpacker tourists and doesn’t really want to help them out. Rwanda wants the tourists who will pay big bucks to go visit the mountain gorillas.

Which is not me and Peter. Our cop friend we were visiting did say the gorillas were amazing, and we should go. But it’s $750 per person, and besides, I just feel a little bad bothering them. My general approach to ecotourism is extreme: nature will be better off if I don’t go visit it.

Instead of visiting the gorillas, we just took a lot of photos like this.

I’ll do a separate post with some more details. Suffice to say for now, we thought we would have “done” it in a week, but I am already plotting my return.

From Kigali, Peter, Rod and I all flew to Addis Ababa. As you do.

This was partly because Ethiopian Airlines was the best way to get to Abu Dhabi (long story; it involves frequent-flyer miles, so I won’t bore you). But it was also because Peter and I have both loved Ethiopian food since forever. And Ethiopian music. So why not stop?

Before we left Kigali, our police officer friend’s wife warned us that Addis would be a rough transition. “It is very dirty,” she sniffed. “Lots of chaos.” After being in pristine and orderly Rwanda, I figured any place would be.

But, whoa. Addis felt like Cairo circa 1992. The taxis are Ladas. The pollution is bad. The street kids are frenzied and miserable and one of them yoinked Rod’s phone right out of his pocket (but was clumsy and dropped it, so Rod got it back).

The mean streets of Addis Ababa.

But our Bradt guidebook said of Addis that “its bark is worse than its bite,” which I think is a rather sweet assessment. And after a couple of days, I could see this was true.

It helped that, ohmygod, they really do eat Ethiopian food in Ethiopia. I will get to this in more detail.

From Addis, we flew to the UAE. In the morning, we were in a Lada taxi with smoke coming up through the floorboards. In the afternoon, we were in a leather-interior late-model Audi, being whisked along the smooth, straight highway from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. Totally disconcerting. We were so wiped out, we slept through our entire Etihad business-class flight. Rats.

We landed in Bangkok, third and final leg of the trip. If there’s one thing this trip taught me, it’s that three countries is just too damn many. I don’t know how people do the steady-nomad thing and still absorb anything. I’m glad I’ve been to Bangkok before (was this our third trip? or fourth?), because if it had been my first, I would’ve just collapsed in the street.

Peter’s mother met us, and she kept us moving–without her, we would’ve flopped by the pool at the Atlanta Hotel.

Look at us, sightseeing!

But, as a result, I came home and needed to flop around some more. Traveling thoroughly accompanied for three-plus weeks was exhausting. I did a lot of sitting on the couch and staring into space.

Then I went to Costa Rica for about ten days and stared into space some more.

And here we are. Finally. More details to come, folks.

A very nice picture Peter took of his mother and me, near the end of a long and interesting day. Phew.

TEN-GODDAMN-YEAR Anniversary

January 12, 2004, I started this thing, just a little bit ahead of the full-on blog frenzy. Now I’m still doing it, well after blogs have gotten old and doddering and faintly uncool.

In a perfect world, I would trawl through all the old posts and remind you of the highlights. But where is the time? I am busy eating street food in Bangkok as we speak. VERY busy.

This blog has sometimes emphasized the Roving, sometimes the Gastronome. Sometimes neither. (That post used to have a photo. No thanks to Yahoo, which fortunately no longer hosts this blog, it has vanished. Perhaps for the best.)

Either way, this blog has helped me become a better writer (proof: two posts have been the foundation of two successful book proposals), and I appreciate everyone who has followed along for the ride.

Much love to all, and thanks for reading!

The 2013 Highlights Reel

The last few years, I’ve really enjoyed doing the end-of-year wrap-up. This year…it’s a tiny bit of a strain.

That’s not because 2013 sucked. It’s because I stayed home a lot, with my butt in a chair, staring at a computer screen. (See previous post.) The “writer” part of “travel writer” was the main thing going this year.

To that end, Highlight #1: I finished my $%#$#$%#$–I mean, fabulously stupendous and thrilling!–book draft. It was a little anticlimactic. One imagines triumphantly running laps to cheering crowds. Instead, one presses ‘send,’ then turns to all the other crap that has piled up in months of neglect.

(Does this mean you will very soon see my book on store shelves? No. Getting a book into book form takes a good long time. Anticipated publication date is February 2015. Please keep your breath bated till then!)

I wasn’t in NYC for the entire year. I went to New Mexico several times, which yielded some great moments. Highlight #2 was doing one of my dream stories, eating my way around Silver City, New Mexico. Thanks to the New York Times travel section for publishing the results! The story was, for a thrilling moment, the seventh-most-emailed on the NYT site, and someone hated on me on Twitter for it! You know you’re coming up in the world when you’ve got a Twitter hater…

On my second trip to New Mexico (why so many? Because Jet Blue started direct flights to Albuquerque!), I camped out at my mom’s for a while and wrote, and then, Highlight #3, Peter and I spent a few days at Los Poblanos. This may very well be my most favorite hotel in the world, and believe me, I never thought I’d be saying that about anything in my hometown. They have the cutest damn goats. And a lovely restaurant. This is the first time in my life I’ve done what felt like a grownup resort vacation. Paid real money. Lolled around the pool. Drank wine with our friends. Visited the goats. I wouldn’t want to do it alllll the time, but I can see the appeal, when it’s somewhere with taste as good as Los P’s.

Then, Highlight #4, Peter and I traveled overland and car-less from Albuquerque to Vegas to California. Why? Just to see if we could. We took Amtrak to Williams, AZ, then took the tourist train to the Grand Canyon. At the Grand Canyon, we hopped on the return flight of a scenic-tour plane to Las Vegas. We were the only people on there with luggage, and top in my little file of smug travel moments now is the one where the pilot was like, “What? You flew one-way? You don’t have a car?” and gave us a thumbs-up. That made up for walking around Vegas in record-high temps. Then we flew to SFO (sorry, no snazzy workaround there), attended a wedding by bus due to the BART strike, and finally, took Amtrak to Los Angeles, on the fab Coast Starlight. The whole thing cost marginally less than if we’d rented a car, so that’s also in my file of smug travel moments. On the other hand, it costs a damn arm and a leg to travel in the U.S.! Now I know for sure that our trips to Thailand are in fact cheaper, including airfare.

Highlight #5 came on my third trip home (yup, on JetBlue), when I went waaaay down to the far southwest corner of New Mexico. That’s all in a post here. NM is my mainstay guidebook title (new edition from Moon coming in the spring!), and it’s great that there are still spots I haven’t seen. And they’re so damn beautiful.

After the last NM trip, I buckled down at home. Strangely, that was Highlight #6, writing–a very distinct thing from Highlight #1, which was finishing. In fact, the actual writing should be Highlight #1, and being done with writing (for now) should go farther down the list. After I managed to get myself focused and settled down, I really did enjoy spending a good six or seven hours every day messing around with words.

And my industrious fake-office-job schedule meant I had the evenings free, so I managed to do Highlight #7, painting my living room. My friend Amy picked the color, and it is beyond fabulous.

Benjamin Moore Venezuelan Sea, if you’re curious.

(I also finally finished painting the dining room–astute readers of this blog may remember the Bollywood dining room as a highlight of, er, 2009.)

Oh, and Highlight #7.5, because this isn’t a design blog, but we got a new dining room table and chairs. The chairs I bought in Raton, New Mexico, and shipped home and still paid less than anything here in NYC. More and more, my guidebook jobs turn into shopping trips.

That’s about it for 2013. Today, as this posts, I will be on the way to Rwanda, followed by a few days in Ethiopia. Switching gears entirely.

Happy new year, and best wishes for all new destinations and ever-more-comfortable home bases!

One Crazy Trick for Working Productively at Home

Freelancers! I finally cracked it!

And it’s the most boring thing in the world:

Pretend like you have a real job.

These are the images that come up when you search for “office job.” Coincidentally, they are the same images that come to mind when I think the phrase “office job.”

Starting time is 10 a.m. You get a lunch hour–that’s when you do all your fiddly errands, like running to the frame store, or looking at rugs on eBay. (Ignore the unfairness that, in a real office-job situation, people don’t relegate eBay searches to lunch hour.) You knock off around 7 p.m., and spend your evening painting the living room, reading books, whatever.

I KNOW. The whole point of being a freelancer is so you don’t have to do this crap. But…it works. At least it worked for me for the last critical two months of finishing my book draft. (It’s done! It’s done. 150,000 words, give or take. Now: the long wait.)

But, of course, fooling yourself into thinking that your writing is as important as a regular office job, and that you absolutely have to show up for it–well, that requires a whole other bag of tricks. Such as:

1. Clock in with Toggl.

Usually I use Toggl to make sure I’m earning an OK hourly rate on low-paying jobs. For the book, I just used it to make sure my butt was in my chair for at least seven hours every day.

2. Clear your schedule.

Like this, for instance. Note the absence of holidays as well.

For a freelancer, saying no to work is the most painful thing in the world. But you’ll have to do it until you get this one thing done. You know how you tell yourself that you work more efficiently when you have a few projects to play off each other? It doesn’t work when one of those projects is massive and genuinely requires all of your time.

3. Be married.

It’s nice to have someone to pay the bills and cook meals, in the background.

4. Don’t be married.

Regular human interaction, such as giving and receiving love, is just too distracting. Also, another human in your space who keeps different hours from you can be too distracting.

5. No, wait, be married.

What am I thinking?! Of course you need love and human support. What would I have done without Peter? Then again, it did help that he went to Australia for ten days. That was when I could really set up a regular work schedule.

6. Embrace electronica.

You need low-key, nonstop music. No lyrics. I like SomaFM: Deep Space One for mornings, Earwaves for afternoons. Def Con Radio occasionally, because the weird motivational samples make me feel like I’m at a different job.

7. Log out of Facebook.

Some people resort to turning off the Internet, but I found that if I just logged out of Facebook, I quelled the urge to visit it all the time, because logging back in was a hassle. All my other time-wasting strategies are relatively harmless (except for those eBay rugs…). If you do need something stronger, Concentrate is a good Chrome plugin.

8. Eat an easy breakfast.

If you are, for instance, waking up hours before your partner (and not because you’re one of those oh-I-can-only-create-in-the-cold-clear-light-of-dawn people, no sir, but only because said partner sleeps till noon) and you want to get right to work with a minimum of fuss, you must dispense with all morning food creativity.

To this end, I have started every day since, oh, October 2012, with two slices of a particular Swedish-ish fruit-nut bread. The indomitable Cristina Topham, aka The Wayward Chef, gave me the recipe, in a slightly more Swedish form.

I cannot praise it enough. It’s like granola, but granola you can spread butter on. It keeps you full until noon, when said partner may awake and fix you lunch.

This is what comes up when you search for “Swedish office job.” Don’t they have heat in Sweden?

Freelancers Breakfast Bread

This bread may actually be the one crazy trick to working productively at home–many thanks again to Cristina Topham.

I buy all the ingredients in bulk and keep them in the freezer (nuts, rye flour, seeds especially), so they don’t go rancid. For a denser, more sour bread, you can shift the flour more toward 2:1 rye:AP. Don’t ignore the flax seeds–they have a nice slippery quality. I made it without them once, and it was meh. And note the long bake time: You must make this on one of your free evenings, not in the morning.

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix together in a big bowl:

1 1/4 cups rye flour

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups rolled oats

1/4 cup flax seeds

1/4 cup pumpkin seeds

1/2 cup nuts (I usually use pecans; you can break them up by hand, rather than chopping)

1 cup dried fruit (I usually use cranberries or cherries because I don’t have to chop them; apricots are good too, but should be chopped)

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

In a measuring cup, combine:

1 3/4 cup buttermilk (or regular milk with the juice of half a lemon squeezed in; or yogurt thinned with milk)

1/4 cup each maple syrup and molasses (or all molasses)

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir. Every time I make this, it’s a different consistency, but it tends toward super-thick, like glue. Don’t make yourself crazy stirring in the flour–if there are a couple of dry spots, it won’t matter too much.

I bake this in two smaller loaf pans, so I can freeze one; you could also use one large one. Either way, butter it or line it with parchment paper. Squash the batter into your loaf pans and smooth the top with a wet knife (that’s the Cristina Topham pro-tip right there).

Bake on the bottom rack for between 1 hour (two small pans) and 1 hour 20 minutes (one large pan). Let cool on a wire rack. Slice thin and eat with lots of butter and pinch of crunchy sea salt, plus very milky coffee, which, Cristina tells me, is the Swedish way.

A Bad Idea for a Holiday Gift

You know all those seasonal stories in magazines are researched a year ahead of time. This is one of those. Here, as we launch into the season of frantic gift-buying, may we at Winslow Place tell you an inspirational story about the perils of late-night advertising?

One day in deep winter, we received a package. We weren’t expecting anything…

Peter loves packages.

Knives? Who packs knives in a foam cooler?

China’s finest knives, KuchenStolz.

Now the foam cooler is making more sense. Frozen steaks?

Oh! Another Chinese kitchen accessory!

Gourmet franks! What’s not to love?

Stuffed Sole Fillets. Weird.

OK, now…if you have a television, and you watch it late at night, you by now probably know what this box is. We don’t, so we were very, very puzzled about this assortment of foods and objects all in the same package. We also had no idea who had sent it to us. So we just kept unpacking.

Life insurance ads? With the steaks? How morbid can you get?

Conversation starter cards! Would you go back to life before cell phones?

FINALLY, in the bottom of the box, we found a card.

Our slightly demented friend Dan was responsible. His card said, roughly, “I’ve watched these ads so many times, I’ve always been curious about this. But I didn’t really want to try it myself.”

I think it must’ve been an ad along these lines, but more tailored for insomniacs. And Dan was probably imagining our unpacking it would go something like this.

We live in a kind of special little food bubble here. It was odd to read the brochures touting the “grain-fed beef,” and we spent a lot of time squinting at the ingredients on that stuffed sole. And the brochures were like the kind I haven’t seen since I was a kid, when we’d get them tucked in the Parade magazine. By moving to New York, I guess I thought bragging-about-grain-fed beef and life-insurance ads in fake old-computer font just stopped existing…but they’re out there, of course, and now they were in our kitchen.

We ate it all. The beef was delicious. Good little reminder about why people started feeding cows grain in the first place. The stuffed sole was just fine, and the stuffed baked potatoes were really good. The only thing that was gross were the “gourmet franks”–yes, the only thing I’d been excited to see in the box when we unpacked it. Apparently, “gourmet” means “squishy, with no snappy skin.” Shudder.

But, bottom line, even after we’d eaten everything, the best thing in the box was what we found in the very bottom.

DRY ICE! Also something I haven’t seen since I was a kid.

Sugar Duck was very impressed.

We can genuinely say thank you, Dan, for this strange and wondrous gift pack that provided such entertainment in the dreariest time of year. We just might not wholeheartedly recommend it to others.