Leipzig (more or less rhymes with My Pig, incidentally)

I've spent most of this tour saying "What do the locals eat here? I'll have that," which has on one occasion resulted in the arrival of a two-foot-long sausage, but has mostly been a very successful way to dine. Tonight, though, I noticed that the hotel in Leipzig contained a Japanese restaurant, and wistfully asked if anyone would mind if we had sushi. So my publishers and Gerd and I went to the Japanese restaurant, and I ordered some sushi from the menu, and soon the waitress came back and explained that the exotic things I had ordered, like yellowtail, weren't actually available. I asked for some different fish from the menu. She came back and said that she didn't actually think they had those, either. We asked if she could find out what they did have, and she said she couldn't really ask because the Sushi chef was Korean and she didn't speak his language, she would just give him the menu numbers and he would tell her if he could do it or not. So I went and peered into the sushi chef's glass case, and ordered some rather sad tuna and salmon, which was all he had in there, and I wondered whether it might not actually have been wiser to have gone to a restaurant the locals ate in after all.

Anyway. Germany's over. I had fun today at the Leipzig bookfair (and I keep mispronouncing Leipzig). Tonight was odd, but very pleasant -- a reading in the jazz-club basement of a local pub, for about fifty people at the most.

At the fair I met the delightful Meg Cabot, which I was hoping I might do ever since I noticed from her blog that she and I were more or less doing the same European tour, although she actually was the one who came and found me because she'd noticed the same thing. When I mentioned that my daughter Maddy loves Meg's books with an intense passion, Meg handed me the book she'd been reading from and signed it for Maddy, thus making me a really cool dad. I wanted to give her a book of mine, but all the nearby ones were in German, which she did not read, so I didn't. She and her husband will be in Paris of course tomorrow, at the book Salon, and so will I, and I'll try and find something by me to pass on to her as a thankyou.

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Dave McKean wrote to tell me about an exhibition he's doing, with a lot of art for sale, and I (this is the editorial I, in this case meaning that I forwarded Dave's email to the Web Elf, who did her usual bang-up job of making things happen) have posted it all at http://neilgaiman.com/journal/davemckean/ so whether you want to look online, browse, buy art over the web, or if you plan to go and see the stuff in the flesh (you'll need to be able to go to Rye though), you can click on it and decide.

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According to SFX, the London Forbidden Planet signing starts at 5.00pm on Friday the 30th of March.

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Someone sent me a link to a Russian fake Stardust poster (not even a good fake, either). I'm just glad Paramount will have a real trailer up tomorrow at http://movies.yahoo.com/ and a real poster up very very soon.

There's an article on a visit to the Edit Suite (with spoilers) up at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/comments/?entryid=409089

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Nick Sweeting from Improbable wrote to let me know that the National Theatre of Scotland's production of THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS is going to open the New Victory's Autumn season in 2007, performances from the beginning of October. (That's in New York.) Tickets probably won't go on sale for three or four months, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere else in the US at this point, but I'll post the info as I get it. (And it's been years since I pointed out that you can get WOLVES screensavers and ecards and things at http://www.gaimanmckeanbooks.co.uk/wolves.htm.)

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Why am I still up and writing this? Why aren't I in bed. Anybody sensible would be in bed. It's almost two in the morning.

Labels: completely abandons the idea of writing lots of labels and goes to bed instead, Sushi thoughts