Travels in the Riel World

Nicholas Kristof had an interesting column earlier this week, comparing the educational systems in the U.S. and China. Here are some of the relevant passages:

With China’s trade surplus with the United States soaring, the tendency in the U.S. will be to react with tariffs and other barriers. But instead we should take a page from the Chinese book and respond by boosting education.

One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do…

I visited several elementary and middle schools accompanied by two of my children. And in general, the level of math taught even in peasant schools is similar to that in my kids’ own excellent schools in the New York area.

My kids’ school system doesn’t offer foreign languages until the seventh grade. These Chinese peasants begin English studies in either first grade or third grade, depending on the school. Frankly, my daughter got tired of being dragged around schools and having teachers look patronizingly at her schoolbooks and say, “Oh, we do that two grades younger.”

Kristof goes on to provide several suggestions as to why “Chinese students do so well.” Some of his reasons include:

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television…

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America.

The city of Seville, Spain, is well known as a tourist destination and cultural center. It is apparently also a quite seductive and romantic place, at least according to this travel article from the Boston Globe:

True to the legendary Don Juan who prowled its cobbled streets, this city seduces at first sight.

Plazas blossoming with orange trees intoxicate with their heady aroma. Palace windows covered with Moorish latticework beckon with the promise of secrets within. Moonlit nights illuminate a soaring cathedral tower into a setting for storybook romance. Like its immortal fictional son, Seville has it all: looks, charisma, wealth, pedigree, an air of mystery, and passion.

A living monument to the Golden Age of Spain, Seville offers all the history and poetic inspiration one wishes. At every corner, timeless pleasures await: people-watching at sidewalk cafes, lingering over garlic-drizzled tapas, surrendering to the charms of coal-eyed flamenco dancers and the mournful, gypsy-inspired ballads of throaty baritones.

One of the most enchanting cities of old Europe, Seville has the irresistible allure and easy confidence of an experienced lover.

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a nice holiday weekend these past few days.

There was a light-hearted article in the Sunday NY Times about travel, tourism and cultural differences, which is worth a read.

Every summer, people all over the world become acquainted again with a deep truth spoken by the philosopher-tourist Steve Martin. He was speaking for tourists everywhere, not just to France, when he said: “Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!”

That people from different countries observe different customs — not only of speaking, but of eating, sleeping, gesturing, counting change, observing boundaries of personal space, tipping cab drivers, standing in lines, avoiding certain topics of conversation at dinnertime as unbearably disgusting — is a truism one probably can never be reminded of too often.

…it is bad news only in those isolated cases (which you hear about if you talk to cabbies, tour guides and certain sarcastic individuals in sales) where the awe of Mr. Martin’s revelation is supplanted by the ugly reality of a culture clash — a tip denied, a personal boundary violated, or a long line at a drug store counter jumped by a family of Italian-speaking people, who forever thereafter shall be remembered by the offended party present (an acquaintance of mine) as those “ugly Europeans.”

Let it be said that no group holds a monopoly on the title of “ugly.” Tip-stiffing, line-jumping, excessive price-haggling, sidewalk-blocking-when-stopping-suddenly-to-take-pictures-of-a-person-playing-the-steel-drums — none of these are unique to any national group…

“Ugly” behavior in tourists is almost always in the eye of the people being toured; and Americans are no longer the only, or even the dominant group of tourists out in the world. We are now as often toured as tour-ing.

And New Yorkers, it turns out, are just as likely to be exasperated being toured by tourists unfamiliar with their local mores about tipping or standing in check-out lines, say, as the Achuar tribesmen of Ecuador are to be offended by tourists who sit on certain sacred rocks.

The moral of the story, of course, is that cultural differences matter, even for tourists.

To be an ugly tourist is to miss the fundamental truth in Mr. Martin’s statement. “It is to have an overall lack of understanding that there is such a thing as cultural difference,” wrote Prof. Inga Treitler, the secretary for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology.

I saw a unique story in yesterday’s newspaper about a library service in rural Kenya that delivers books by camel.

And you thought the bookmobile was rustic. Try having your books delivered by camel, then reading them under the shade of the acacia tree.

For 11 years, eager readers in Kenya’s isolated North Eastern Province have been doing just that, thanks to the Camel Library Service. Begun with three camels, the library, which operates close to the Somali border in Garissa, now has a dozen camels traveling to four settlements a day, four days a week, hauling the world of books to a semi-nomadic people.

After the books are spread out on grass mats under the shade, readers choose their books, which are written in either English or Swahili, the two official languages of Kenya.

This topic so intrigued author Masha Hamilton, in fact, that she wrote a novel about it - titled, appropriately enough, The Camel Bookmobile.

Congratulations to Caitlin Snaring! The 14-year-old from Washington state won the National Geography Bee, becoming only the second female champion in 19 years.

The questions at the bee ranged from the location of rivers to political upheaval, demographics and land formations. With each question, Caitlin coolly stared ahead for a few seconds before responding.

Her father, David Snaring, said his daughter got serious about studying for the bee after her miss in 2006. She created binders of information broken down by continent. “She is so motivated,” he said. Caitlin said she also creates color-coded maps to keep track of world politics, industry and religion.

Caitlin clinched her crown with this question:

Q. A city that is divided by a river of the same name was the imperial capital of Vietnam for more than a century. Name this city, which is still an important cultural center.

A. Hue

If you want to test your own geography knowledge, there are some online quizzes at TriviaPlaza.

There are a lot of issues simmering these days in Turkey, from negotiations to join the European Union, to agitations by the Kurds for more autonomy, to a debate about democracy between secular and Islamist parties. None of that lessens the allure of the country as a travel destination, however. Tom Haines, travel writer for the Boston Globe, recently reported on a visit to Turkey.

It is impossible to travel in Turkey, revered by outsiders for its history spanning civilizations and intimate Mediterranean coastline, among so much more, and not see signs of the cultural conundrum that remains after 84 years of statehood. Yet debates about identity are most often muted, carried out in the press, in cafes, or in prisons. Turkey, a heavily policed country, is usually calm.

Visitors — many million each year, from Russia and Britain, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, among others — have little problem finding what they seek: rediscovery of long-gone empires, or escape where Europe and Asia meet.

It is in maneuvering between vacation destinations and historic sites that contemporary Turkey presents itself. Join the crowds of commuters on Bosporus ferries. Or walk the streets and wait: One evening, on the main avenue of Sanliurfa , two suit-wearing students asked where I was from. I said the United States.

“Would you like to come to our home for dinner,” one said.

I bought an offering of baklava for the table. Then we settled around broiled chicken, olives, cheese, and conversation about everything from soldier strength to cellphone ring tones. It was nourishing.

There is no doubt that technology can influence a society, but can it also change a culture? That question is part of an intriguing article in the Christian Science Monitor about internet use in China, which has grown rapidly in recent years.

In 1999 there were just four million Internet connections in China; by the end of last year there were 137 million. More than 70 percent of Chinese children between ages 7 and 15 had used the Internet at least once, according to a survey Sun’s center carried out last year. That was nearly half as many again as the 2005 figure, and the total rose to 87 percent when only urban youngsters were polled.

This increased internet use seems to be forcing at least a few changes in the Chinese educational system, which is slowly morphing from a teacher-centered style to one in which students are more involved in the learning process. A potential result of this in the long-term, of course, could be a more open, more decentralized Chinese state, one that is less amenable to top down control.

Excited and emboldened by the wealth of information they find on the Internet, Chinese teens are breaking centuries of tradition to challenge their teachers and express their own opinions in class.

Wearing jerseys emblazoned with the names of European soccer stars, downloading weekly episodes of “Prison Break,” listening to 50 Cent, and reading Japanese comic books, China’s current high school generation is plugging itself directly into international culture.

And it’s giving the kids ideas. Ideas that could one day transform the way this country is governed.

“The Internet has given Chinese children wings,” says Sun Yun Xiao, vice president of the China Youth and Children Research Center.

Many are using those wings to fly in the face of received wisdom about how and what they should learn, and about how much respect they owe to authority. “Today students ask you, ‘Why?’ And if you don’t have a good answer, they won’t necessarily accept what you say,” says Zhao Hongxia, a young teacher at a private school in Beijing. “In my day, if the teacher said something he was always right.”

I’ve written about medical tourism before, and the topic seems to receiving increased attention these days. There was an article about it in the NY Times Sunday travel section. In the story, Joshua Kurlantzick discussed his experiences with medical care in Thailand.

Finishing my lunch at an open-air restaurant in downtown Bangkok, I felt slightly queasy. But by the time the taxi arrived back at my hotel, sweat was pouring out of my armpits, the folds of my stomach, even my shins, and my leg joints buckled as if a diamond-tipped drill was boring into them. As I got out of the taxi, I collapsed onto the street.

The taxi driver shoved me back into his cab, and we wove our way through the city’s infamous traffic to Bumrungrad International, a hospital near my hotel. I barely made it to the emergency room before I passed out. When I woke and remembered what had happened, part of me wanted to bolt from my E.R. bed. I knew very little about Thai medical facilities, and recalled a clinic I’d seen in neighboring Myanmar, where patients had to bring their own linens, needles and even bandages to the hospital.

Yet my Bumrungrad doctor, trained in America, immediately put me at ease. Surrounded by a gaggle of nurses ready to care for my every complaint at any time of day, the doctor informed me, “We’re pretty sure you have dengue fever,” referring to a dangerous tropical disease also known as breakbone fever…While I rested in a spotless room, he designed a program for my recovery, recommended a week of convalescence, and prescribed an array of medication for the searing joint pain.

When I visited Bumrungrad’s cashier, passing the hospital’s high-end restaurants and plush waiting rooms along the way, an assistant handed me the bill. For admittance to the emergency room, a consultation, a room and bags of medications, the total cost came to less than $100.

The increased level of’ medical care in places like Thailand now has some Americans looking abroad for both major and minor health procedures.

My unscheduled visit to Bumrungrad taught me an old lesson - and a new one. For decades, Americans have known they could obtain cheaper health care abroad, and have slipped off to Mexico for small surgeries or Canada for prescription drugs. But more and more people now recognize foreign hospitals can deliver not only cheap but also high-quality health care, and are considering medical tourism even for serious health problems…

Already, more than 150,000 people travel abroad each year for health care. According to Patients Without Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism, a new book by Josef Woodman, overseas care can trim 60 to 80 percent, or more, off the price of major surgeries. Its comparison, for example, shows that a heart bypass in India costs one-thirteenth the price in America, and many foreign hospitals also offer postoperative care that includes a high degree of attention from hospital staff members.

Are those infamous city-a-day package tours fading into oblivion? Not totally, no, but according to Newsweek magazine there is a definite trend among tourists these days toward more leisurely, less hectic vacations.

As work life becomes increasingly hectic, holidays are occupying a more important place in our lives; when we take a break, we want to truly step off the treadmill—even as (or maybe because) we cling to our BlackBerrys. Just as the slow-food movement encouraged diners to savor meals and the way they are produced, the trend toward slow travel promotes a more thoughtful style of vacationing.

It refers not only to leisurely and environmentally friendly modes of transport—train, boat, bike or foot—but also to the nature of the trips: smaller in scope and more off-the-beaten-path—a custom-crafted trek through niche sites rather than a top-10 group tour.

Additionally, more travelers seem to be opting for longer holiday periods. This is a bit surprising, given the short vacation traditions of U.S. society. Of course, perhaps people can take more time off, as the story suggests, because technology enables them to stay connected. Regardless, it’s an encouraging trend.

With time shares and second-home ownership on the rise, many travelers are taking off for longer periods of time, enabled by the technology that allows them to connect to the office even as they paddle around the Arctic.

More and more, people are living for vacation. They are using up every single allotted day off, and bargaining with their employers for more time to savor their travels. Gone are the days when holidays were a discreet, predictable part of the year; today they are more typically considered an essential, non-negotiable part of life.

The Inca Empire of South America was known for a few of its architectural achievements, as well as for a remarkable system of roads and bridges that enabled fairly quick communication among communities that were scattered throughout the rugged terrain of the Andes Mountains.

The NY Times just ran an interesting article that combined a bit of culture and science when it provided an overview of the Inca transportation system, and particularly the suspension bridges that were built across canyons. These bridges were made from natural rope fibers.

Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.

So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century…

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

The Peruvians apparently invented their fiber bridges independently of outside influences, Dr. Ochsendorf said, but these bridges were neither the first of their kind in the world nor the inspiration for the modern suspension bridge.

There was a five-part series on NPR recently in which a reporter delved into Indian life by traveling the length of the Ganges River. The waterway, which is considered holy by Hindus, extends more than 1,500 miles from the Himalaya Mountains to the edge of Bangladesh and cuts across a long swath of northern India.

The river passes through India’s most populous state, its most lawless state, its holiest city and its cultural capital, Calcutta.

Our journey provides the opportunity to learn how Indians feel about the changes taking place in their country as it moves toward world power status: how they feel about its rapid economic growth, the co-mingling of ancient and modern, materialism and spirituality and the widening gap between rich and poor.

One of the more interesting stops on NPR’s tour was in the city of Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in this spiritual country.

Nowhere in India do you feel more surrounded by — and immersed in — Hinduism than Varanasi. India’s holiest city, Varanasi is one of the oldest in the world, said to be as ancient as Babylon and Thebes…

Here the river is the centerpiece. She is wide and brown. Despite general grubbiness caused by slogging across north India’s heavily populated plains, she is also surprisingly majestic. This is Mother Ganga at her most sacred: Every day in Varanasi, about 60,000 Hindus bathe in her waters in search of spiritual regeneration.

As a secular agnostic, and an outsider to boot, I’ve never really expected to fully comprehend Hinduism, or its fascinating multitude of gods and complex mythology. Yet there are times you can lift the veil and glimpse just a little of what lies within.

There is no better place to try than on the stone steps, or ghats, that lead down to the Ganges at Varanasi. We arrived at dawn to watch the faithful gather for their morning rituals. It was a clear morning; the river’s muddy surface radiated with a wide shaft of golden light cast by the rising sun.

The scene was inspiring and transfixing, and yet also curiously casual. Men in the lotus position sat motionless, deep in meditation. Half-naked sadhus, or Hindu ascetics, prayed and sang earnestly as they dunked themselves in the holy waters. But only a few feet away, people were scrubbing pots, washing clothes and brushing their teeth. Some of them were just having fun, cavorting in the water and splashing one another joyfully.

Varanasi is certainly an interesting destination, one that is equal parts fascinating and frustrating, as Lisa and I discovered during our own visit there in 2005.

Interesting proposal from Scott MacLeod at Time Magazine’s Middle East blog - to create an Arab Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. in order to create dialogue and cross-cultural understanding between Americans and Arabs. He writes:

My idea is for a major institution that would provide a permanent museum; space for regular temporary exhibitions; an auditorium for lectures, debates, readings and musical performances; a cinema showing films on Middle Eastern themes; a library for research; a bookshop specializing in the Arab world; a magazine highlighting its themes and programs; a great restaurant featuring the cuisine of Lebanon, Morocco and other Arab locales; in short, it would be the Arab world’s dynamic home address in America.

The Arab Cultural Center would have three aims: 1) to develop and increase the study of knowledge and understanding of the Arab world, its civilization and relations with the U.S.; 2) to encourage cultural exchanges, communication and cooperation between the U.S. and the Arab world; and 3) to thus participate in the development of a closer relationship between Americans and Arabs.

Such objectives, to state the obvious, are of huge importance and urgency. After the Iraq war, Arabs are warier than ever of the U.S.; Americans are still asking the post-9/11 question, “Why do they hate us?” I’m certain that things will not improve simply by waiting for the U.S. government to change policies that Arabs don’t like, or for Binladenism to wither away.

A big effort needs to be made so that “ordinary” Americans and Arabs can participate or even take the lead in bridging the gap. It is no substitute for encouraging governments and leaders to adopt better policies, but fostering greater understanding through cultural interaction will in itself have a significant impact on societies and policies. For Americans, including the foreign policy makers in Washington, that means desperately developing an understanding of the Arab world that is not largely if falsely based on stereotypes related to terrorism and Islam.

Everybody has a part to play–governments, media, educational institutions–but an Arab Cultural Center can be a vital galvanizing influence. Establishing a landmark center in Washington will send a powerful message to 300 million Arabs that America truly does respect Arab culture and values–and not just Arab oil.

In my opinion, anything that could create dialogue between two cultures that evidently don’t understand each other very well is worth considering.

China and Beijing are busy preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics, so Ben Brazil went to Beijing to check out the scene. He discovered a fascinating city balanced on the edge between modernity and tradition and then wrote about his experiences for the Washington Post.

Construction cranes perched on the skyline like flocks of gargantuan, robotic flamingos, and the air was sepia-toned with smog and dust. Walking Beijing’s expansive avenues, widened under Mao Zedong, I felt a heavy sense of anomie.

In part, the feeling came from the city’s sheer size. Beijing municipality, which includes rural and urban areas, is bigger than Connecticut. The city’s urban core and inner suburbs are about the size of New York’s five boroughs, but with much more limited subway service.

Yet I quickly discovered that no city moves so quickly between massive and modest, between anonymous and intimate. On my first day, for example, I drifted south from the vast, gray expanse of Tiananmen Square into the narrow hutongs, or alleyways, of the Qianmen district.

Immediately, the traffic noise faded. Low, gray-walled courtyard homes lined lanes that were often too narrow for cars but dotted with decrepit bicycles. Through an open door, I glanced at a group of friends hunkered over a board game. Farther on, meat sizzled over small braziers, its aroma mixing with a less pleasant sewer smell. A cat crept over a rooftop.

Even with all the achievements of modern science, there are still many times when we can benefit from the accumulated knowledge of the world’s indigenous cultures. One example of this can be found in a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, which reported on the successes of Australian Aborigines in predicting the weather and understanding changes in the climate.

To white Australians, the flocks of red-tailed black cockatoos which flap above tree canopies are a memorable highlight of any weekend hike. But to Aborigines, the parrots are living, squawking barometers.

“A month ago when the cockatoos were flocking and the wattle bushes were flowering, we saw that as signs of rain,” says Jeremy Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre in the Grampian Mountains of Victoria State. “Sure enough, we’ve just had two weeks of rain.”

Where meteorologists base their prognostications on satellites and synoptic charts, generations of Aborigines have observed the behavior of animals and the continent’s flowering of plants.

More than two centuries after the first British settlement was established in 1788, there is a belated recognition that 40,000 years of Aboriginal lore may contribute to the complicated science of Australia’s capricious climate.

After seven years of scant rainfall – the worst drought on record – have left vast swathes of the country parched and barren, the Bureau of Meteorology’s Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project hopes to harness Aborigines’ ancient understanding of weather patterns…

For millennia, Aborigines have known that subtle changes to plants and animals provide clues about the weather. Aboriginal weathermen claim that their predictions are 90 percent accurate and as reliable as the evening television forecasts watched by millions of Australians…

“It’s about reading the landscape and the environment through the activities of plants and animals,” says Mr. Clark, a member of the Djabwurrung tribe.

The Aborigines also have a different conception of the annual progression of seasons.

Aboriginal expertise is also challenging the European concept of four seasons, an axiom the British imported to Australia when they arrived in 1788.

The Northern Hemisphere pattern of spring, summer, fall, and winter sits uncomfortably with the reality of Australia’s climate. Aboriginal tribes, in contrast, recognize up to seven distinct seasons. In the Sydney region, for instance, September and October are known by Aboriginal people as Murrai’yunggoray, the time when the red waratah flower blooms.

It is followed by Goraymurrai, a period of warm, wet weather during which Aborigines would not camp near rivers for fear of flooding.

Pope Benedict XVI just began a visit to Brazil, which has resulted in a spate of news stories about the religious changes afoot in Latin America. Although the region is home to half of the world’s Catholics, the Church has been losing adherents at a rapid clip in recent years. Rather than losing churchgoers to a secular society, however, as has been the case in Europe, the Church has been losing ground to evangelical Protestantism, thus heralding a fairly significant change in the relationship between Latin Americans and their faith.

According to an article in the Washington Post:

Latin America is still predominantly Catholic, but not like it used to be. In Brazil, for example, as evangelical Pentecostalism has spread, the country’s population has gone from being 89 percent Catholic in 1980 to about 64 percent today…

Similar shifts are happening throughout the region, from Mexico to Chile. Young people have shown a greater reluctance to join the clergy, resulting in a priest shortage that is 10 times more severe regionwide than it is in North America or Europe. Many congregations have tried to retain members by relaxing the formality of Masses and infusing services with more emotion, fueling a “charismatic movement” that is now practiced by roughly half of Brazilian Catholics…

“There is a trend here — even among priests — that people should be more free to follow their own conscience, and there’s a growing distance between most Catholics and the church’s hierarchy,” said the Rev. Luiz Roberto Benedetti, a Catholic priest who is a professor of social science at the Catholic University of Campinas, near Sao Paulo. “It’s a trend that goes in the complete opposite direction of the message that the pope wants to send.”

The Los Angeles Times also reported on the story and discussed the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, a Latin effort to retain Catholic churchgoers:

Rossi’s Mass employs traditional prayers and rituals, but otherwise the scene is reminiscent of a Southern revival meeting. At the service’s boisterous conclusion, Rossi uses a bucket to douse worshipers with holy water…

“It’s not a new church, it’s not a new religion, it’s the same Catholic Church — with more passion,” said Father Vandro Pisaneschi, who advises a group of charismatic students on campus. “The church realized that we had to use a different language to reach some of the faithful.”

According to some, this type of service is more in line with Latin American culture.

“It’s very much Latino,” said Father Edward Dougherty, a Jesuit who pioneered the movement in Brazil and helps run a Catholic television station. “Brazilians love Carnival, so we have Carnival retreats. We dance, have a lot of fun…. In the beginning we said we’d be the leaven, we’d be the salt of the food.”

Interesting article in this morning’s NY Times about a desire among many Saudis to open up their society but without giving up the traditions of Islam. These individuals are seeking a middle way between an orthodox version of Islam and the extreme openness of Western society.

Perhaps more than most societies, Saudi Arabia is a land of contradictions, a nation that demands conformity to very strict social rules even as it rides a wave of oil wealth into modernity. Heads and hands can be chopped off as punishment for crimes. But more young people than ever have been awarded scholarships by the government to attend universities in the United States.

It is the extremes that tend to define Saudi Arabia in the Western consciousness, particularly the radicals who see terrorism as a valid way to spread their ideas.

But a lot of people here also say that what they want is something in the middle, not quite Western democracy and not quite the restrictive life forced on them by the ultrareligious. The issue is less immediately about whether women can drive, or whether there should be movie theaters, as it is about the more abstract concept of allowing people to decide some things for themselves.

“Some people think that all you can find here are conservatives or liberals,” said Shemoukh al-Almaei, 23, a university student studying language and translation, as she walked through a mall in the capital city. “But there are people in the middle.”…

The Koran and the Sunna, the teaching of Prophet Muhammad, still serve as the constitution. People all over the kingdom said they lived by the word of the Koran, the literal word. But as with any other religious practice, the literal word is often a matter of interpretation.

“Nobody wants to separate Islam from the state,” said Hussein al-Shobokshy, a writer and television commentator from Riyadh. “But, I am talking for myself, I want to separate sect from the state. We don’t have any choice but to open.”

It is in the space between religion and tradition where many Saudis say they are trying to have it both ways, to enjoy the benefits of the modern world without giving up the traditions of the old.

France has a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who on Sunday defeated Segolene Royal, the first woman ever to compete for France’s highest office. No matter who won the election, the new president was bound to represent an interesting and dramatic break from the French political tradition. Both candidates were born after World War II, thus representing a generational change, and Sarkozy is the son of immigrants.

The Washington Post has an analysis of the election and what it may mean for France.

Both candidates appealed to a yearning in France for younger leadership and a more modern style after 12 lackluster years under Chirac, 74. Registration of new voters was up by 4.2 percent (1.8 million voters) in the last year alone, and French voters engaged in political debates in cafes and parks, and around dinner tables, with an enthusiasm not seen in decades.

The campaign electrified France. The candidates’ youthful vigor, calls for change, embrace of the Internet and more open, American-style stumping revitalized the country’s politics.

Sarkozy’s election may herald some fundamental shifts in France’s political and work culture if he can get his program through the legislature.

Sarkozy’s main campaign thrust was to loosen labor regulations and put France back to work — a fundamental shift in France’s Socialist culture of egalitarianism, in which state guarantees of short workweeks, long vacations and a comfortable lifestyle have been sacrosanct, while ambitious, American-style work ethics were dismissed as greedy and undesirable. At the same time, Sarkozy favors affirmative action programs to help put low-income people to work.

However, Sarkozy’s election also caused dismay among segments of French society, who are leary of his sometimes authoritarian or antagonistic tendencies.

…a second night of post-election violence left cars burned and store windows smashed. While the unrest has been small-scale, it sent a message to Nicolas Sarkozy: He may have won the presidency, but he hasn’t won over the many French who consider him – and his free-market reforms and tough line on crime and immigration – frighteningly brutal.

Sarkozy … is a divisive figure whose tough language and crackdowns on crime and immigration have angered many on the left – and in the immigrant-heavy suburban housing projects that erupted in riots in 2005. An anti-Sarkozy rally in Paris was planned for Tuesday afternoon.

Argentines love to read and to drink coffee. So the annual Buenos Aires International Book Fair, which runs late into the night and draws more than one million visitors during its two-week schedule, is a popular event with most Argentines. Here is a description from a recent Washington Post article:

For all those who love to read, who enjoy getting lost in crowds, who are intrigued by the idea of a powerful espresso after midnight, who loathe being rushed, who get mildly depressed when reading yet another article prophesizing a straight-to-hell future for the printed word — this is the time and the place for you…

Unlike some international book fairs, this one does not cater to publishing industry types. It caters to readers. These readers happen to live in one of the world’s great nocturnal cities, where cafes do brisk business until dawn on streets named for writers — Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Hernandez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and so on.

Seven minutes after midnight, the entrance to the exposition looks like an amusement park at noon on a Saturday. Chorizos, spicy sausages, and hamburger