I’m in Guadalajara right now,  in the midst of a two week trip around Mexico.

It’s certainly an interesting time to travel here, during this prolonged aftermath from the spate of horrendous headlines earlier in the year. Although Mexico hasn’t been as much in the news recently, my upcoming journey seemed to trigger anxieties for a number of people I know, even for those who are well-traveled and not terribly jittery. In the weeks leading up to my departure, I attended several screenings of vivid mental horror movies starring narco-terrorist drug wars, violent crime and everyone’s favorite villain, the Swine Flu.

Guadalajara: Not a War Zone

There’s a sociological phenomenon called “Mean World Syndrome”, which is created by media coverage that focuses excessively on the crime and violence (or disease and illness). It convinces people that the world is more unsafe than it actually is.

I contend that Mean World syndrome is as widespread as the common cold, particularly when it comes to travel in the developing world. Bad news creates lingering bad impressions that are difficult to overcome.  The fact that the US State Department lifted its swine flu inspired recommendation to avoid non-essential travel to Mexico back in May 15th  2009,  and that it now seems just as likely that you can contract this flu in the United States, does little to convince people that a visit to Mexico now is nothing like licking a H1N1 lollypop.

As for Mexico’s crime problem, well, I don’t want to minimize it.  I never even considered visiting the areas that are the most dangerous at this moment — Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City, Nogales, for example. But cities, let alone entire countries, are big places.  In any city, in any country, there are parts of town that you don’t want to go, ever, and parts you don’t want to go to alone, and parts you don’t want to visit at certain times. I’m not completely sure I see the difference between geographic over-generalization and stereotyping.

All of what I’ve said so far are the arguments I could martial in response to the mental horror films before I left home. But it’s hard to really know how you’re going to feel in a destination before you actually hit the ground. So now that I’ve been here for four days, and can say this: I’ve felt no more menaced in Guadalajara than I’ve felt walking around in any large city, which is to say, not at all, not during the day, and not during the night. In fact, between the billboards for Rachael Ray, Starbucks, 7-11 et. al., there have been many times when my mind wandered and I momentarily thought I was in Southern California.

I’m not saying it is just like the United States here — it’s not. But this afternoon, as I strolled around the arts district of Tlaquepaque, admiring purple corn roasting on the grill, inhaling the scent of freshly made tortillas, eating a vanilla and walnut ice cream confection, and threading my way through crowds enjoying the same, I realized that what I was experiencing was about as far away as it’s possible to get from a country that’s alternately thought of as a petri dish or a war zone. And it’s one of the many pleasures that the Mexican strain of the Mean World Syndrome is obscuring from the broader view.

Anyone driving through California’s gold country later this month to enjoy spectacular autumn foliage could be in for a big surprise if they drive south on Highway 41 and end up in the small town of Coarsegold just outside of Mariposa county.

Sure, on the outside it looks like a quiet old gold town where nothing much is happening. But look closer and the place is alive…with tarantulas.

Seriously. Mid-October to mid-November is tarantula mating season in this part of the county and instead of letting it creep them out, the residents of Coarsegold have turned it into a party with the creepy-crawly tarantulas being the guests of honor.

Over the past twelve years, the town has held the Coarsegold Tarantula Festival which includes tarantula racing, a competition for the hairiest legs of both men and women, and a pumpkin dessert contest.

It’s BYOT  (bring your own tarantula) for the tarantula races. I’m not sure how they are trained but the races consist of heats of ten hairy spiders making their way through a dryer tuber, with a handler at each end. At stake – a gift certificate and the coveted Tarantula trophy.

None of the tarantulas, by the way, are harmed in the races and most are released back into the wild once the festival is over.

And for anyone who feels the urge to scream at the sight of all these hairy eight legged creatures (and who wouldn’t), there’s an a ‘scream off event’ scheduled where everyone is encouraged to let loose with blood-curdling screams.

If this sounds like your type of fun, this year’s Tarantula Festival is being held on October 24th in the town’s Historic Village. You can’t miss it. Just look for the giant tarantula sculpture sitting in the tree!

This slideshow from the 2007 Coarsegold Tarantula Festival highlights Coarsegold’s love affair with tarantulas.

For the record, I haven’t attended any of the Tarantula Festivals. And I can’t say I have any plans to in the future.  It’s just a little too hairy and creepy for me!

(image source)

Trying local food is a major part of any travel experience. But what happens when the local food falls under the  ‘extreme cuisine’ category? Do you look upon the experience with relish and fascination? Or do you, like me, make up all the excuses under the sun not to try it?

To be honest, I’m simply not all that adventurous when it comes to food. But just because I don’t want to eat it doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by what other people are willing to eat. I’m always more than happy to be an observer. I’m always keen to go to the Wild Foods Festival held in Hokitika, New Zealand every March. But not to chow down. I go just to wander around, take in the atmosphere and watch others enjoy the experience of eating grasshoppers and grubs and drink bulls semen and other outlandish concoctions.

I’ve even been known to watch Fear Factor and other televisions shows that encourage the eating of what many would call ‘extreme cuisine’. 

More recently, I’ve been reading a new book by Lonely Planet called Extreme Cuisine.  Written by Eddie Lin, it invites the reader to challenge their idea on what is good eating. The small, pocket sized book features 50 of the world’s most interesting and bizarre foods from around the world.

Some might argue that not all of the 50 items are that extreme. After all, marmite is a staple diet for New Zealanders and Australians and Haggis is fairly common place for the Scottish.

But most of the foods listed really are pretty extreme. Take for example Casu Marzu from Sardinia. Literally translated, it means ‘rotten cheese’. More accurately, it is maggot-infested cheese.  Thanks but no thanks!

There’s also tarantulas, stingrays, bull penis, and cow’s udder. Plus raw chicken, pure pork fat, and fugu for those with a death wish.

But what’s even more extreme, at least to me, is that author Eddie Lin, obviously an intrepid and fearless eater, has sampled each and every one of these foods in the course of his search for extreme cuisine. And, I might add, he has lived to tell the tale.

Each food is given two pages. One page features a huge, technicolour picture of the specific food and the opposite page provides a colourful description, explaining what it is, where you can find it, and how it tastes (and smells and looks). It makes for very interesting reading. But, be warned, the vivid pictures and text are not for the weak of stomach.

On the other hand, Extreme Cuisine would make the perfect Christmas stocking stuffer and conversation piece for the adventure traveller and food lover in your life. If I didn’t already have a copy, I’d sure be adding it to my Christmas wish list.

(Disclosure: Lonely Planet Extreme Cuisine was provided free for review)

I live in Nashville, TN and see all the great reasons to live or visit, but I’ll admit that art is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of this city. Well, unless it’s the art of songwriting, or playing the guitar.

There’s an on again, off again history of fine art in Nashville, bookended by Red Grooms before and Herb Williams now—the latter an artist who creates sculptures out of Crayola crayons. What has really brought the city recognition though the past decade though has been the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. This is a fine museum housed in a fantastic building: an Art Deco post office from 1934 that was lovingly converted to a two-story art museum.

There are usually three main exhibits downstairs (including one showcasing living modern artists), then a permanent collection and a hands-on children’s center upstairs. Kids 18 and under are free even, so there’s double incentive to expose them to some culture.

A new exhibit on Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Times just opened, with paintings of hers and contemporaries from the same period, all on loan from the Lane Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. O’Keefe has a long and complicated history with Nashville. Her husband Alfred Stieglitz left his collection to Fisk University, a college that has 91% of its students getting financial aid these days. The university is strapped for cash and his been trying to sell a couple paintings to enable them to take care of the rest, which has resulted in a big legal battle.

Anyway…this exhibit of her work plus Ansel Adams, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley and others is balanced by one featuring the rural realist Thomas Hart Benton and Art Week cover boy Oliver Herring. In the upstairs gallery is a photography exhibit, Surrealism in Paris.

If you’re into architecture though, you may be as taken by the building and the historic photos on the walls leading to the cafe as you will be by the art on the walls. It’s an impressive place and I still get excited when I visit.

Admission is under $10 and if you bring a food donation to Second Harvest you get in free on Mondays. There are college nights as well if you have a student ID. There’s a worthy hotel to stay in right across the parking lot: the Wyndham Union Station Hotel, which used to be the city’s train station. There’s a Flying Saucer branch behind it if you want to wet your whistle after the gallery viewing.

See more at FristCenter.org

For most of my childhood, Leningrad was, in my imagination, the city of my mother. It was she who told the stories, who described the romance of the gray metropolis where she and my father had met, and where my relatives resided. As I grew up during the Cold War with a Russian father, both the relatives and the city were things it seemed I was never destined to meet.

But then Gorbachev opened a tiny wedge, and we moved to Soviet Moscow, and I finally got to meet my grandmother and visit the Leningrad of my father’s childhood. At the time, I was still a young girl halfway under the wings of my parents and other relatives, unable to experience the city without hovering adult protection. This situation lasted until I was almost 30. No matter how independent I became, or how much I wanted to experience the city — now back to the name of its Imperial Russia beginnings, St. Petersburg — my aunts, uncle, and cousin stood lightly by my elbow wherever I went, translating both language and impressions.

It was only when I spent 2 weeks there attending the Summer Literary Seminars that I finally got to develop a relationship with St. Petersburg on my own. During that short time, when I was renting my own apartment and guiding my own feet, I shed my mother’s stories and my relatives’ viewpoints and got to know Peter, as the locals call it, for myself.

For me, it became, finally, the city of my father. And I also fell completely, ridiculously in love with it.

It is probably because Moscow was my first introduction to Russia that I had always had a preference for it, despite its noise and dirt and crime-riddled everyday life. It was my city. That was until I spent two weeks tramping the canals and islands of Petersburg on my own, map in hand, during its most beautiful season: White Nights in July.

White Nights is a time for celebration. I was there once during Soviet times, when the entire populace wandered the city’s streets all night long, drinking the slightly alcoholic kvass and eating soft ice cream from paper-like cones. To say St. Petersburg has changed since then is like saying the Industrial Revolution really changed the West. It’s not a different city, but it’s certainly a cleaner one, and a brighter one, and a wealthier one.

While my relatives still live in the same apartments they’ve inhabited since the 1960s, and live in the same modest style, you would never guess people like them inhabit the same place as the youth flaunting their high fashion and high heels on the catwalk known as Nevsky Prospect.

Even the ice cream has changed: from state-run soft ice cream stands (vanilla only, and a cardboard-like vanilla at that), to freezers full of a variety of Nestle bars every block or so.

Peter the Great built St. Petersburg as a planned city to rival the European capitals he’d lived in during his youth. The Soviets, shedding the glory-hungry past of the tsars, searched for their own glory in making Leningrad one of the industrial capitals of Russia. That’s how my engineer grandparents ended up there. It’s probably, also, why my first impressions of the place were overwhelmingly gray.

Now, you walk along the repainted and refurbished buildings facing the River Neva, including the massive Hermitage museum, and it’s like you’ve dropped into an Alice in Wonderland type Easter basket, full of buildings instead of eggs. Even the sunlight hitting the canals at midnight seems warmer, brighter, more beautiful. St. Petersburg is like Paris in the quality of its light, and the way the soft sky picks out the graceful buildings and church domes.

But some things haven’t changed. The bridge where my daredevil father used to illegally jump into the river with his friends is still there, and boys probably very similar to him hang onto its posts to dive for watery treasure. The grassy area where he used to sunbathe and pick up girls is still covered in people sunbathing, and likely doing plenty of picking up either way.

There might now be a Lexus dealership next to the apartment building he grew up in, where he lived in exactly one room with his brother, sister, parents, and grandmother, and they shared a kitchen with three other families. The building is still there, although when I visited it was gutted and, like much of the city, being refurbished.

St. Petersburg isn’t the sort of city you can change easily. You can add to it, and destroy some of its old imperial buildings (which luckily the Soviets neglected to do), but it’s hard to get rid of the canals, and harmony Peter the Great worked so hard to create in his city plan.

Even with Gazprom’s new proposed phallus (also known as a glass skyscraper, but that’s just semantics) dominating the city’s skyline, you can’t change the fundamental beauty of St. Petersburg. It is a place I have grown to hanker for, with its proud history and complex people. They are, after all, my people, and after finding my father’s place in St. Petersburg, it has become my place and my people, too.