BEA Day 1

Sorry it took me so long to post. I didn't have a computer in New York. The first thing I did after getting back to Baltimore was to turn on my laptop, only to discover that the house's wireless had mysteriously broken while I was gone. It's all fixed now, though, which is probably good because I didn't have time to link this blog to everyone I wanted to before I left. Sorry if you're just coming upon this now!

My New York trip will take a couple of entries to write up. It was very eventful and I didn't get a moment's rest. Kind of like a certain high school choir field trip, except without the stomach flu plague.

We left early Thursday morning. The group consisted of the other intern, my boss, his wife (who is also a director and author in the organization), and their 11-year-old son. I was sitting next to the son, who watched The Golden Compass on his portable DVD player during the ride. I've been avoiding that movie because of all the horrible reviews it got, and was surprised to see that they didn't butcher the book that badly. I mean, they did butcher it, but I was expecting way worse. It wasn't torture to watch.

We parked almost immediately after getting out of the tunnel, and then my boss proceeded to empty out the trunk. When I visit places like this with my family, we usually park at the hotel (when we went to NYC, our hotel was in New Jersey), and then take public transportation to get where we need to go, especially if we have stuff to carry. We are not city people. These were city people. In fact, they had both lived in New York City, and they were used to walking. So we walked, carrying (or pushing, in the case of the dolly of books) all of the supplies we needed to set up the booth. I wasn't carrying as much as some, but I felt pretty accomplished after we got there.

We each got nametags that said we belonged at the show. We were warned that these were very expensive pieces of paper and to not lose them under any circumstances. We set up our booth, which was in the aisle of small presses (the VRG self-publishes all of their materials).

I should pause here to explain what BookExpo America is. I'll probably get some of this wrong (as a disclaimer, I may get a lot of things I write further on wrong, because I learned all of this in three days of crazyness), but from what I understand, it's a trade show for the publishing industry. The main participants are publishing companies, who are looking for new books, trying to advertise their current stock, and networking. There are also distributors, who handle getting books to the booksellers (I think. I'm a little unclear on the distributing part of this equation). They're there looking for new clients. There are some authors hoping for publicity and a chance for a company to pick up their book(s). And other various groups, such as booksellers and the press. This year they were spotlighting new media, and there were quite a few bloggers there.

Like I said, we were in the small press aisle. We were next to and across from two people trying to get someone to take on their self-published books. We were also across from an Islamic publishing company who were passing out free Qur'ans. They were pretty awesome. On our right was this company: Man Love Romance (link is safe for work, unless you work in a very conservative place. Or if you don't want your coworkers wondering about you). They were hilarious, because despite the vaguely pornographic setup they had going at their booth, the women and man working it were totally down to earth and normal. They were even dressed in business clothes. On the second day, they gave away Twizzlers. It was completely bizarre.

Farther down the aisle were remainders sellers. This was the first thing I saw when I walked into the show floor, and I nearly died of joy, because there were just books everywhere. Books! I was at a professional conference about books! What cooler place could I possibly be? Anyway, I soon discovered that the remainders section wasn't really the most exciting part of the conference. You know those discount books you find at the dollar store or in that one corner of your local Borders? The ones that occasionally contain a treasure, but are mostly just a bunch of themed cookbooks and educational children's books? Well, they don't start off as discount books. When books don't sell, they go the remainders (who I believe are separate companies from the publishers), who take them to shows like the BEA and put cheap price tags on them. But instead of buying one for $3, you buy a hundred for... whatever is cheap for a hundred books. I don't remember. We looked through the remainders for vegan cookbooks, because our company would have bought that, but they didn't have any.

The show didn't start until Friday, so after we set up we walked back to our car to get our bags for the hotel. I had a large duffel bag, plus my little purse/backpack. I assumed the hotel was nearby. It was, if by "nearby" you're speaking in New Yorker. If I have the right parking garage on the Googlemap I just made, it was a fifteen minute walk, which sounds about right. Fifteen minutes, in the heat, carrying heavy bags. And have I mentioned that I have tendinitis in both hands? It's healing, but this trip tested that. I was incredibly proud that I made it without having to stop.

Being a party full of vegans (and one vegetarian, me), we were thrilled that our hotel was right next to a Whole Foods. The other intern wanted to visit, so she and I walked down there and were even more thrilled that they served hot food. I was drooling over the samosas, so I got that and she convinced me to try a few other Indian dishes. It was something like $7.00 for pound, and I managed to get enough food to fill me up for $4.00. And it was all delicious.

Later that evening the whole party walked down to Chinatown for dinner. We went to a vegetarian Chinese restaurant that I unfortunately don't remember the name of and decided to share a few dishes. For the vegetable dish, we got watercress, which was pretty good. We decided to get two mock meats: chicken chow fun and A Sam fish. The chow fun was delicious and the mock chicken was excellent. The fish was interesting. It had a crunchy seaweed outside, which everyone else liked. I couldn't break it apart with my chopsticks, so I mostly ignored it. All of the long-time vegans at the table were totally grossed out by the texture inside the "fish," which was surprisingly realistic (the texture, not the taste). I had no problem with that and just wished it was a little fishier (it just tasted like the sauce it was cooked in). Apparently I'm a bad vegetarian. For dessert, we had soy ice cream and tofu cheesecake. Both were good. After this meal, I came to the conclusion that I need to take vegans with me whenever I dine out, because they know where the good food is. I think the rest of the trip went on to prove me right.

After we left the restaurant, we went on a long walk through Chinatown, Little Italy, and Greenwich Village (I may be combining another day into this, but wherever I went, trust me when I say it was a long walk). It was fascinating, because as I said, my boss and his wife lived in the city and knew how to give a good tour. In Little Italy we ran into a random street fair. We had a sad moment where we discovered that all the funnel cakes were fried in animal fat and therefore not for us. But then a very random and very tiny Italian marching band walked through the fair, which distracted us from the disappointment.

Eventually we made our way back to the hotel, exhausted from all the walking. If only I knew how much walking there was to come.