Travels in the Riel World

Well, it’s a small sign of progress, at least. It’s possible that women in Saudi Arabia will soon gain the right to drive.

Buoyed by recent advances in women’s rights, advocates for the right of women to drive in Saudi Arabia — the only country in the world that prohibits female drivers — say they believe the ban will be lifted this year.

The women’s group has collected more than 3,000 signatures in the past five months and hopes that King Abdullah will issue a royal decree giving women the right to drive.

Since taking the throne in 2005, Abdullah has championed women’s right to work and often takes official trips overseas with delegations of female journalists and academics. The king has said that he does not oppose allowing women to drive but that society needs to accept the idea first.

“I think the authorities want people to get used to the idea and will lift the ban before the end of the year,” said Wajeha al-Huwaider, 45, an educational analyst and co-founder of the group.

There is, however, still a long way to go before Saudi women achieve anything even approaching equal rights.

Saudi Arabia follows a strict form of Islamic law that does not allow women self-guardianship, mandating a male guardian for women of all ages. A woman cannot travel, appear in court, marry or work without permission from a male guardian, sometimes her own son.

Until recently, women were also barred from checking into hotels and renting apartments unless they were with a male guardian. But a royal decree announced this month now allows women to stay in hotels and furnished apartments unaccompanied…But in this deeply religious and patriarchal society, many believe that allowing women the right to drive could lead to Western-style openness and an erosion of traditional values.

Europe is, of course, known as the home of great chocolate. Belgium, Switzerland and France are all at or near the top of most lists of the world’s best chocolate-producing countries. On the other hand, chocolate and Asia are two words not often found in the same sentence. However, Business Week recently wrote about the growing popularity of chocolate in numerous Asian countries and at the efforts by major chocolate makers to produce new flavors to appeal to the Asian palate. Green tea chocolate, anyone?

With the European and U.S. chocolate markets pretty well saturated, big-name chocolate producers from both regions are looking for growth from China and India, two countries not known for their love of the stuff. Luckily for chocolate companies, increasingly wealthy and well-traveled Chinese and Indians are clamoring for Western products, and many now see chocolate as a luxurious, exotic indulgence…

Efforts to appeal to different tastes in sweets have prompted multinational chocolatiers to experiment with ingredients that might not fly in their home markets: ginseng, dates, red beans, and green tea, for example. One company even added chocolate to cheese—a double-yuck in East Asia—and surprisingly, the combination was a hit from Taiwan to Thailand.

There was a fascinating article a few days ago in the NY Times, just prior to the death of former Indonesian President Suharto, which discussed the power of local beliefs in spirits and black magic. The story focused on mystical explanations as to why Suharto was clinging to life, but in the process it also illuminated the role that mysticism plays in the daily lives of many Indonesians and contemplated how animist beliefs have managed to hang on in a contemporary Muslim society.

The diagnosis among believers here in Solo, the heart of Javanese culture, is that powerful occult forces in (Suharto’s) body will not let him go, that certain rituals that would cleanse his spirit have not yet been performed or that nature has not yet signaled that it is ready to receive him…

Indonesia is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, the most populous in the world, with 240 million people. But the version of Islam practiced by most people here is mixed with the Hinduism, Buddhism and especially animism that were present before Muslim traders brought their religion to the country in the 12th century.

Animist beliefs and superstitions color everyday life for many people, and occult explanations, including the power of curses and black magic, are sometimes given for everyday events.

“Indonesian Islam is what I call accommodative,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta. “Most Indonesian Muslims accept local tradition even though the local tradition could not be accepted by, say, Wahhabi-minded people,” he said, referring to followers of a strict Islamic sect.

When a reporter expressed skepticism about the existence of spirits, a local mystic responded this way:

“It’s just because you don’t understand, just the way I can’t understand you when you speak English.” … “It’s not mysticism,” he insisted, as if trying to break through a language barrier. “It’s reality.”

Mt Kilimanjaro. It’s a mountain adventure that is accessible to people without mountaineering skills and is one of the great dreams of many travelers. This Tanzanian peak can also lay claim to one of the world’s most famous images, the “snows of Kilimanjaro.” Neil Modie decided he wanted to climb Kilimanjaro before melting glaciers removed most or all of the snow from the mountain. He wrote about his weeklong hiking experience for the NY Times.

Given Kilimanjaro’s snow, glaciers and volcanic upbringing, it didn’t look all that different from peaks I’ve climbed in my native Northwest. From my living room in Seattle, I can gaze at Mount Rainier, which I’ve climbed a dozen times. Even in the dead of summer, it retains a mantle of ice that makes it seem like a hulking life form. Kilimanjaro is almost unimaginably bigger: nearly a mile higher, it covers 1,250 square miles abutting Kenya.

And yet, unlike Rainier, climbing Kilimanjaro required no real mountaineering skills, no ice axes, ropes or crampons, merely strong legs, hearts and lungs for trudging more than three and a half vertical miles above sea level. That, and a supply of Diamox, to fend off altitude sickness.

Our approach was on the Machame, the most scenic and second-most heavily traveled — a distant second — of the six designated routes to the summit. Even so, our six camps along the way, five on the ascent and one on the descent, were 200-tent metropolises.

The most heavily congested approach is the Marangu, called the “tourist” or “Coca-Cola” route, a reflection of its overcrowded, touristy ambience and the ubiquitous soft drink, which is sold at camps along the way. Our longer, more macho Machame is known as the “whiskey route.”…

We passed through ecological zones of spectacular diversity: equatorial rain forest, followed by misty heath and moors dotted with outsize, otherworldly flora, then alpine high desert and finally the frigid, dry summit zone. It was all on trail, but several steep stretches required grabbing handholds on near-vertical rock.

Japan has long been one of the most homogenous nations in the world. Although the Japanese are often welcoming to tourists and visitors, they have not always been so enthusiastic about foreigners who settle in their country. There are signs, however, that the famous Japanese reticence toward outsiders may be receding, at least among young people. The Christian Science Monitor recently published a story about this topic.

Miharu Tanaka hands out fliers in Tokyo advertising Brazilian eateries in Oizumi, a city two hours away by train. The young woman makes the commute to encourage people to visit the country’s most diverse city, with its 16 percent non-Japanese population.

Her efforts are part of a generational shift toward becoming more receptive to a multicultural Japan. But in a country that has long prided itself on homogeneity and is seeing a rise in Japanese-centric nationalism, it will take some persuading for most people to embrace the growing reality of a more diverse population. Japan has long been wary of – even hostile to – foreigners in its midst…It is virtually impossible for immigrants to find work here and become citizens…

But a growing number of Japanese – mostly youths, such as Tanaka – are trying to persuade compatriots to embrace ethnic minorities. Unlike in previous generations, young adults tend to be more welcoming of diversity…In Oizumi, young Japanese are teaming up with Brazilians, cracking barriers among communities. Tanaka formed a group named Kimobig (”daring”) to energize exchanges such as language classes between Japanese and Brazilians.

Baxter Jackson went to Oman to each English and ended up learning a thing or two about the relations between males and females in that Muslim society. He wrote about his teaching experiences for Lonely Planet.

I sneak a peek at (the men) in their starched-white dishdashas (wrist-to-ankle shirt-dresses) and embroidered caps as they wait patiently for me near their classroom entrance - the girls have their own. This will be the first time these young men and women have been in the same room since hitting puberty.

I catch up to the ladies in the hall and watch them walk in, sit down and prepare for class. With no boys around, the Omani girls fiddle and rewrap their hejabs (veils) just as Western girls fuss over their hair and make-up. After stealing a glimpse, I round the bend and take the ‘male’ door into class…My entrance is the boy’s cue. As I unload my bag, they file in and respectfully shake my hand. They sit at the front of the classroom and as far away from the girls as possible…

Even though the students don’t look at each other, talk to each other or directly acknowledge each other’s presence in class, I find out later that their diffidence towards the opposite sex is not grounded in repugnance (there’s a population explosion going on, after all) nor in a sense of hierarchy (women and men share work separately in all sections of society) but in a collective reluctance to avoid bringing criticism to the one thing that matters most in Omani society - family.

So the outward symbols that I initially perceived as oppressive - the women in black, the men in white, the signs for men here and women there - were nothing more than signposts for separate but equal realities.

Sure, American weddings can be extravagant and pricey. But would you pay the equivalent of two-to-seven years’ salary for a wedding celebration? Many families in Afghanistan do just that, according to this NY Times article, which notes that guest lists often run from 600 to 2,000 people and that poor laborers who make $350 a year can easily spend more than $2,000 for a wedding. The average middle class celebration costs more than $20,000.

On the afternoon before his wedding day this fall, Hamid was sitting in an empty teahouse worrying a glass of green tea between his fingers, his brow furrowed in concern. He confessed to feeling a certain anxiety at seeing his bachelor’s independence slipping away. But something else was troubling him, as well: the cost of his wedding.

In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.

Hamid, a midlevel bureaucrat in the Afghan government who supports his six-member family on a salary of $7,200 per year, said his bill was going to top $12,000. And by Afghan standards, that would be considered normal, or even a bargain.

Why?

Afghan bridegrooms say tradition and societal pressure leave them with no alternative but expensive weddings in spite of their poverty. Marriage is arguably the most important rite of passage for a young Afghan man, and the luxuriousness of the ceremony reaffirms his family’s status.

“It’s a way to solidify your position in the tribal network,” explained Nasrullah Stanikzai, a lecturer of law and political science at Kabul University.

If you like to read, then you likely have a favorite local bookstore or two. But what about when you travel? As Beth Harpaz of the Associated Press asked in a recent article, “When is a bookstore worth a tourist’s time?” She went on to profile nine U.S. bookstores that were “worth traveling for.” It’s a nice companion story to a similar piece in the U.K. Guardian, which went further geographically and recommended 10 favorite bookstores around the world.

Some selections from the international list:

* Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen (Maastricht, Netherlands). What does a city do with an 800-year-old church with no congregation? Well, it could make like the Dutch and convert it into a temple of books. The old Dominican church in Maastricht … has been turned into what could possibly be the most beautiful bookshop of all time.

* El Ateneo (Buenos Aires, Argentina). All the world’s a page at El Ateneo, a bookshop converted from an old theatre in downtown Buenos Aires … with high painted ceiling, original balconies and ornate carvings intact. Even the crimson stage curtains remain part of the show. Comfy chairs are scattered throughout, the stage is utilised as a reading area and café, and even better, the former theatre boxes are used as tiny reading rooms.

And from the U.S. recommendations:

* City Lights Books (San Francisco).  This store, a city landmark, was co-founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti … The store continues to serve as a center for counterculture activities and politics … Tourists also like to stop in at the bar next door, Vesuvio, to have a drink where Kerouac once bellied up.

* Tattered Cover Book Store (Denver).  Visitors to Denver often go to 16th Street, a mile-long outdoor mall through the heart of LoDo, historic Lower Denver. There, amid breweries and boutiques, near the arenas where Denver’s major league teams play and across from the train station, you’ll find the Tattered Cover. “We get a whole lot of tourists, along with people waiting for trains and fans hanging out until game time,” said spokeswoman Patty Miller … The LoDo location is especially inviting, with cozy nooks, overstuffed chairs and a gas fireplace.

A few weeks ago, I had some posts (here and here) about the Kenyan elections and the influence of tribalism in that country’s politics. Now, the Washington Post has an excellent article that explores that topic in more depth and examines the role of tribal identity in shaping the political and world views of many Kenyans. A key excerpt:

Tribe in Kenya is a matter of culture and tradition, a designation — often invisible to the casual observer — that defines social networks and political power and at times serves as the foundation for stereotypes used by politicians to manipulate and divide the electorate…

Of the dozens of tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu and to a lesser degree the Luo and the Kalenjin…have remained the primary political forces since independence. At the same time, there is a public consensus that tribalism undermines the founding idea of Kenya as one nation. Any politician hoping to appear as a statesman deplores tribalism in public, even though Kenyans tend to vote in tribal blocs. In certain circles, it is considered rude to ask someone’s tribe because it is not supposed to matter.

Though the Kikuyu and Luo have different ethnic roots, they are virtually indistinguishable physically — so much so that during recent election violence, rioting gangs often asked Kenyans for their national identity cards. It is possible to identify a person’s tribe by his or her name.

But neither ethnicity nor religion, which does not divide the groups, explains the sharply divergent perceptions that Kikuyus and Luos have of their place in Kenyan society. Tribe, woven as it is into day-to-day life, is the way many members of each group explain their successes and failures in a country that until the recent elections was considered the most stable in East Africa.

It’s one thing to travel, it’s another thing to completely immerse yourself in the culture or the daily life of another country. One of the best ways to do this, of course, is to actually live and work abroad. And perhaps even by choosing to do something you might never do at home. Like, say, working in an olive orchard? Patricia Fieldsteel did exactly that, moving from New York to France and getting a job harvesting olives in Provence. She wrote about her experience for the New York Times.

I work a small organic farm with 350 trees in Nyons in northern Provence, where I now live…Some of the local trees are said to be over 1,000 years old. Olive trees never die but give birth from their stumps to new shoots that grow into trees. They have been in the Mediterranean basin for at least 6,000 years and most likely were brought to Provence by the Greeks before the birth of Christ.

A mature olive tree is almost a sentient being; to spend time with one is an intimate, spiritual experience. Every tree is different, having its own personality and aura. Growers often endow each of their many trees with a human name and human attributes. Sometimes I ponder all that a tree must have witnessed in its majestic silence over the centuries. Each year, I experience a sense of contentment and peace that has rarely, if ever, been present in other jobs I have had…

We work daily from dawn to dusk, with Sundays off, sometimes. We break for lunch, enjoying a communal meal around an old farm table by a wood-burning stove — bread, cheese, sausage, pâté, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats and sometimes homemade soup, followed by chocolate, fruit and steaming bowls of café au lait.

Did anyone see Newsweek’s recent “What’s Next” issue? It included a multi-story feature about the rise of China as a superpower and some of the ways in which the country is evolving.

From the cover story by Fareed Zakaria, here is a dramatic overview of just how fast China is growing these days:

Lawrence Summers has recently pointed out that during the Industrial Revolution the average European’s living standards rose about 50 percent over the course of his lifetime (then about 40 years). In Asia, principally China, he calculates, the average person’s living standards are set to rise by 10,000 percent in one lifetime! The scale and pace of growth in China has been staggering, utterly unprecedented in history—and it has produced equally staggering change. In two decades China has experienced the same degree of industrialization, urbanization and social transformation as Europe did in two centuries.

Recall what China looked like only 30 years ago. It was a devastated country, one of the world’s poorest, with a totalitarian state. It was just emerging from Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which had destroyed universities, schools and factories, all to revitalize the revolution. Since then 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China—about 75 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction over the last century.

And here are two opposing views of whether a Chinese-U.S. conflict is inevitable in the coming decades:

Some scholars and policy intellectuals (and a few generals in the Pentagon) look at the rise of China and see the seeds of inevitable great-power conflict and perhaps even war. Look at history, they say. When a new power rises it inevitably disturbs the balance of power, unsettles the international order and seeks a place in the sun. This makes it bump up against the established great power of the day (that would be us). So, Sino-U.S. conflict is inevitable.

But some great powers have been like Nazi Germany and others like modern-day Germany and Japan…In another Foreign Affairs essay, Princeton’s John Ikenberry makes the crucially important point that the current world order is extremely conducive to China’s peaceful rise. That order, he argues, is integrated, rule-based, with wide and deep foundations—and there are massive economic benefits for China to work within this system. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons make it suicidal to risk a great-power war. “Today’s Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join,” writes Ikenberry.

There is an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about cell phone use in Africa - not only the dramatic increase in the number of cell phone users across the continent, but also some of the unique ways in which people utilize the phones as compared to the way they are used in the West. An excerpt:

Over the past decade, the number of cellphone users in Africa has grown faster than anywhere else in the world.  According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles unit, the continent’s cellphone usage has increased about 65 percent annually for the past five years – from about 63 million users in 2004 to 152 million in 2006.

“Cellphones are in the deepest rural areas in Africa,” says Saadhna Panday, of South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. “More people have access to a cellphone than a land line.”

And the way people use and care for their mobile phones is different than in the wealthy, BlackBerry-addicted West. Here, people send text messages to friends, but also use their cells to do banking and organize political rallies. In areas with no TV, farmers use phones to get agricultural news and weather reports. (The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange, for instance, sends text messages with up-to-date market prices.) In townships, entrepreneurs will set up cellphone booths, where passers-by can use airtime for a slightly inflated price.

In all these ways, says Panday, cellphones have increased networking among Africans and have lessened the global “digital divide” between haves and have nots.

Last summer, a scientist at the UK’s University of Leicester made news when he produced a world map of happiness, in which 178 countries were ranked by their “subjective well-being.” Several European countries, led by Denmark and Switzerland, topped the rankings. The United States was 23rd. Burundi was on the bottom.

According to a BBC article about the topic, “A nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels.  Prosperity and education were the next strongest determinants of national happiness.”

Now, it seems that Eric Weiner has been traveling through some of the world’s happiest places for a book called ‘‘The Geography of Bliss.’’ The Boston Globe focused on Weiner and some of his destinations in a recent travel feature. A few of the destinations he explored:

* Switzerland. The Swiss have a well-deserved reputation for quiet efficiency and deadly dullness. Yet the nation consistently ranks among the happiest in the world. Are the Swiss on to something? Yes. For starters, nearly everything there functions exceedingly well.

* Thailand. Thailand is known as the Land of Smiles, and for good reason. The Thais have at least a dozen types of smiles, not all of them expressing contentment…Thailand ranks in the middle latitudes of the happiness map, yet that doesn’t tell the full picture. The Thais know instinctively that one of the secrets to happiness is to lead an unexamined life. ‘‘You think too much’’ is a common Thai expression. So is ‘‘mai pen lai,’’ which roughly translates as ‘‘just let it go.’’

* Puerto Rico. (And other Latin nations.) Puerto Rico ranks high in happiness surveys, as do many Latin American nations, despite their relative poverty and often unstable governments. ‘‘The Latino bonus’’ is what some researchers call this phenomenon. Actually, it’s not so mysterious after all. Latinos derive much happiness from their close-knit families and, certainly in the case of Puerto Rico, a fiesta attitude.

It wasn’t that long ago that people in the U.S. were obsessing over the quality of the Japanese educational system as compared to our own. Now it seems the Japanese are having a similar “crisis of confidence,” but they are not concerned over a rebound of education in the U.S. Rather, the Japanese are beginning to sweat over the rise of India as an educational power, according to this recent NY Times article, so much so that parents are clamoring to get their children enrolled in Indian-run schools.

Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.

Despite an improved economy, many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan. And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.

How much better are the Indian schools? According to the article:

India’s more demanding education standards are apparent at the Little Angels Kindergarten, and are its main selling point. Its 2-year-old pupils are taught to count to 20, 3-year-olds are introduced to computers, and 5-year-olds learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English, tasks most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade.

Staying with Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue (yesterday’s post was from the same magazine and covered a road trip through Russia), today’s topic looks at Time’s portrait of Chinese President Hu Jintao. Specifically, at the way Hu is trying to blend the ancient Chinese wisdom of Confucianism with modern economics and a Communist governing philosophy.

In reality, the way Hu has negotiated a difficult situation says much about him as a person and about his evolving and distinctive political philosophy…Hu has ended up as something of a closet traditionalist whose sense of a political true north derives as much from the Chinese classics, to which he has turned in search of models of concord, as it does from Mao and Marx.

In February 2005, for example, Hu quoted Confucius to party officials, declaring that “harmony is something to be cherished.” He and Premier Wen Jiabao regularly proclaim an aspiration to hexie shehui, or a harmonious society. And they often use another slogan, heping jueqi, or peaceful rise, a phrase designed to soothe foreigners worried about the double threat of China’s fireball economy and rapidly modernizing military.

Such traditional-sounding rhetoric about harmony and peace — the antithesis of Maoist phrases about class contradictions and anti-imperialist struggle — has been spilling from party propaganda organs…

Much of his political demeanor seems to suggest a yearning for leadership in the style of a Confucian junzi, or gentleman — one who governs by virtuous example and thus radiates benevolence throughout society…

(But) just beneath Hu’s exhortations about harmony, peaceful rise and benevolent leadership, old Maoist structures remain. Far from wanting to weaken party control, Hu would like to reinforce it, to inspire officials to live up to the old ideals of “serving the people.”

It’s been two weeks since Time magazine named Vladimir Putin its “Person of the Year.” Now that the holiday craziness has ended, I finally got around to reading that issue of the magazine. In it, there is a fascinating portrait of Putin, but also an intriguing article about Russia itself (”In Search of Russia’s Big Idea”), which is the result of a road trip that Nathan Thornburgh took between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russians have always fancied themselves as a special people, not unlike how Americans tend to think of their own nation, and Thornburgh tried to get a read on the soul of the country during his travels. Some excerpts from his report…

“Russia is now resurgent”

I had come to the Russian countryside, though, to get beyond proverbs — and beyond Moscow — in search of what Russians like to call the National Idea. It’s often said that Russia is truly in trouble when it can’t articulate what it stands for. The Soviet National Idea of exporting revolution, conquering space and winning Olympic medals was a strange mix, but at least it was steady. By 1995, the last time I lived there, Russia had disintegrated into a rudderless mess…

Russia is now resurgent…To find Russia’s current big idea, I traced the path of a long-dead St. Petersburg customs official named Alexander Radischev. In 1790, the 28th year of Catherine the Great’s reign, the middle-aged father of four wrote a book called A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow…

With plenty of detours, I visited hospitals, farmsteads, nightclubs and monasteries. At nearly every stop, I heard something that isn’t yet a fully formed National Idea but is perhaps more of a slogan: “Everything is coming back.” This meant a lot of things. Some were talking about rising salaries, others about how Russia had re-emerged as a counterweight to America. But more than anything, they were talking about a return to Russia’s prerevolutionary sense of itself, strong and traditionbound, rooted in religion and autocracy but with a full bank account and a sleek new weapon in oil.

“Do Russians really want to be free?”

Russians are turning inward at the very moment that the Kremlin is mounting a brazen power grab. Governors are no longer elected, just appointed by the President. Opposition leaders are harassed with new antiterrorism laws. Putin’s United Russia Party won a grossly uncompetitive election on Dec. 2. By and large, the Russian people offer little protest.

This raises an old question: Do Russians really want to be free? Russians are, after all, the people who actually begged Ivan the Terrible to return to rule them after he threatened to abdicate. As Radischev put it, Russians “come to love their bonds.”

These bonds — and their modern equivalent, Putin’s paper-thin democracy — are increasingly seen as not only tolerable but also intrinsically, uniquely, gloriously Russian. The Kremlin and its backers use new catchphrases like sovereign democracy to intone that they have their unique form of freedom. The West just wouldn’t understand…Russians are still looking for greatness, on their terms.

Today in New Hampshire, Democrats and Republicans will take another step toward the process of nominating their presidential candidates. The election is a topic of interest not only in the U.S., of course, but around the world.

The Christian Science Monitor recently interviewed people in various countries about their hopes for the next U.S. president. There were differences of opinion over whether certain nations would prefer a Republican or Democrat in the White House.  The Chinese, for instance, were thought to prefer the Republicans’ “more liberal approach to trade disputes.” But according to the story, there was at least one issue that everyone seemed to agree on.

Everyone interviewed responded similarly: America needs to act less unilaterally, to build solutions via consensus rather than imposing them. They want the next president to respect that every country has its own culture and approaches, which may not adapt well to prescriptions cooked up in Washington.

“Democrat or Republican, I do not care,” says Fakhri Karim, a Baghdad newspaper owner and book publisher. “I just prefer a US president that would balance US interests with those of other nations…. The United States must construct its foreign policies based on local knowledge and not based on what advisers come up with at the Pentagon or in the State Department…”

Looking for a few more appealing travel destinations for 2008? Here is a top ten list from MSNBC. A sampling of their recommendations:

* Bhutan. Cradled by the majestic Himalayas in a remote corner of Southern Asia, the “Land of the Thunder Dragon” has long held steadfast to its rich culture and Buddhist heritage. Though an isolated locale and high tourist entry tariffs…keep crowds at bay, these factors have also permitted this last Shangri-La to keep its traditions intact.

* Lisbon. The cheapest capital in Western Europe…is worth a visit not only for its affordability — a huge plus when considering the anemic exchange rate of the U.S. dollar against the euro these days — but for its dramatic hillside villages, fashionable cobblestone enclaves, and innovative cuisine.

* Mozambique. Safely removed from decades of civil war, Mozambique is poised to become Africa’s next big tourist destination. The country’s recent economic success is finally permitting its natural assets — 1,500 miles of unspoiled tropical shoreline, clear blue seas, and pristine reef-fringed archipelagos — to shine.

* Tunisia. While 40 percent of this North African nation is swathed in arid Sahara desert, the remainder is blanketed by fertile soil and hemmed in by over 600 miles of Mediterranean coastline. No wonder it garnered alot of…attention over the centuries from some of the world’s greatest civilizations. See what all the fuss was about next year, by visiting the ruins of the ancient Phoenician city of Carthage and historic sites like the coliseum at El Jem (arguably the finest example of its kind outside of Rome).