Travels in the Riel World

Prague, Czech Republic

The architecture and flowers of Old Town Square in Prague.

Yesterday, I had a post about gender relations in Saudi Arabia and the remarkable lengths that the society goes to in order to maintain separation between males and females of different families. I linked to a story in the International Herald Tribune in which young men were interviewed about their interactions with women. Today, we cover the second part of the Tribune’s series, in which a reporter writes about male-female relations from the perspective of Saudi women.

First, an overview of the situation that females deal with in Saudi Arabia:

The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear floor-length black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are driven around in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments and eat in “family” sections of cafés and restaurants, which are partitioned off from sections used by single male diners.

Women-only gyms, women-only boutiques and travel agencies, even a women-only shopping mall, have been established in Riyadh in recent years to serve women who did not previously have access to such places unless they were chaperoned by a male relative.

Playful as they are, girls like Othman and her friends are well aware of the limits that their society places on their behavior. And, for the most part, they say that they do not seriously question those limits. Most of the girls say that their faith - in the strict interpretation of Islam espoused by the Wahhabi religious establishment here - runs very deep.

They argue a bit among themselves about the details - whether it is acceptable to have men on your Facebook friends list, say, or whether a male first cousin should ever be able to see you without your face covered - and they peppered an American reporter with questions about what the young Saudi men she had met were thinking about and talking about.

But they seem to regard the idea of having a conversation with a man before their showfas and subsequent engagements with real horror. When they do talk about girls who chat with men online or who somehow find their own fiancés, these stories have something of the quality of urban legends about them: fuzzy in their particulars, told about friends of friends, or “someone in my sister’s class.”

Well-brought-up, unmarried young women are so isolated from boys and men that when they talk about them, it sometimes sounds as if they are discussing a different species.

A view of pre-wedding interactions (or lack thereof) between engaged couples:

…it is becoming more and more socially acceptable for young engaged women to speak to their fiancés on the phone, though more conservative families still forbid all contact between engaged couples.

But it is considered embarrassing to admit to much strong feeling for a fiancé before the wedding, and before their engagements, any kind of contact with a man is out of the question.

And even a glimpse into some of the clandestine back-and-forth that takes place between young Saudi men and women:

A woman cannot switch her phone’s Bluetooth feature on in a public place for fear of receiving a barrage of love poems and photos of flowers and small children that many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for the purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis had started buying “electronic belts,” which use Bluetooth technology to beam the wearer’s cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex.

Tukhaifi and Shaden know of girls in their college who have passionate friendships, possibly even love affairs, with other girls, but they say that this … is just a “game” borne of frustration, something that will inevitably end when the girls in question become engaged. And they and their friends say that they … don’t know any girl who has actually spoken to a boy who contacted her via Bluetooth…

“One test is that if you’re ashamed to tell your family something, then you know for sure it’s wrong,” she continued. “For a while I had Facebook friends who were boys - I didn’t e-mail with them or anything, but they asked me to ‘friend’ them and so I did. But then I thought about my family and I took them off the list.”

Like yesterday, the actual Tribune story is much longer and filled with a wealth of other anecdotes and details.

After reading through both articles, two things struck me. One, of course, is that young men and women in Saudi Arabia have the same longing for romance and playfulness as do young people everywhere in the world. But the other revelation was the almost complete sense of acceptance (at least among those interviewed for the articles) regarding the importance of the culture’s moral values and the need for the social restrictions that keep males and females apart from each other. Just more proof that, as I’ve said before, we are all silently and permanently molded by the assumptions of the culture in which we are raised.

It’s easy in the West for us to express shock or dismay at the state of gender relations in some Arab countries (the veiling of women, the separation of the sexes, etc.), and particularly in a very conservative culture such as Saudi Arabia’s. However, it’s also easy for us to forget that many people in those cultures not only accept their state of affairs but also believe it to be in their best interests.

I’m not advocating any particular position here, and I do feel considerable sympathy for individuals who are constricted by the conservative dictates of their culture. But it’s nevertheless an interesting exercise to try to view a culture from the perspective of someone who was born and raised in it. That’s what the International Herald Tribune did recently, in a fascinating two-part series that looked at gender relations in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of men and women in that society. Today, I’m providing a few excerpts from the article in which young men discussed their relations and romances.

An overview of the state of gender relations: 

In the West, youth is typically a time to challenge authority. But what stood out in dozens of interviews with young men and women here was how completely they have accepted the religious and cultural demands of the Muslim world’s most conservative society.

They may chafe against the rules, even try to evade them at times, but they can be merciless in their condemnation of those who flout them too brazenly. And they are committed to perpetuating the rules with their own children.

That suggests that Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam, largely uncontested at home by the next generation and spread abroad by Saudi money in a time of religious revival, will increasingly shape how Muslims around the world will live their faith.

Young men like Nader and Enad are taught that they are the guardians of the family’s reputation, expected to shield their female relatives from shame and avoid dishonoring their families by their own behavior. It is a classic example of how the Saudis have melded their faith with their desert tribal traditions.

“One of the most important Arab traditions is honor,” Enad said. “If my sister goes in the street and someone assaults her, she won’t be able to protect herself. The nature of men is that men are more rational. Women are not rational. With one or two or three words, a man can get what he wants from a woman. If I call someone and a girl answers, I have to apologize. It’s a huge deal. It is a violation of the house.”

A glimpse into how men and women end up agreeing to marry despite not knowing each other:

Enad’s father agreed to let Nader marry one of his four daughters. Nader picked Sarah, though she is not the oldest, in part, he said, because he actually saw her face when she was a child and recalled that she was pretty.

They quickly signed a wedding contract, making them legally married, but by tradition they do not consider themselves so until the wedding party, set for this spring. During the intervening months, they are not allowed to see each other or spend any time together.

Nader said he expected to see his new wife for the first time after their wedding ceremony - which would also be segregated by sex - when they are photographed as husband and wife.

And a look at the small romantic rebellions that take place even in Suadi Arabia:

…Saudi traditions do not allow for romance between young, unmarried couples. There are many stories of young men and women secretly dating, falling in love but being unable to tell their parents because they could never explain how they knew each other in the first place. One young couple said that after two years of secret dating they hired a matchmaker to arrange a phony introduction so their parents would think that was how they had met.

These are small excerpts from a much larger story that is well worth reading if the topic interests you. Tomorrow, the female perspective.

Madrid and Lisbon. Since the capitals of Spain and Portugal are so close geographically and share a Latin European heritage, one would assume they have nearly identical cultures. In some respects this is true - if you’re doing business in either place, for instance, you’d better be adept at building relationships and be patient with time and deadlines. However, as Peter Mandel discovered during a recent trip, there are also many differences between these two Iberian cities. He wrote about his discoveries for the Chicago Tribune.

Spain and Portugal are like fresh sangria and old port. They are different tastes. And while the euro has helped make each prosperous in unimagined ways, the two are like neighbors who roll their eyes at the shouts and spicy smells that drift from next door.

Here is his impression of Madrid:

Spain’s capital and biggest city, Madrid doesn’t change its accent for a tourist. It stays up until dawn, then dissolves into a scramble of avenue stores, clinking cafe spoons and traffic sounds…

Set smack in the center of the country on a 2,100-foot-high plateau, the only thing that Madrid doesn’t have is coastline. It doesn’t need it. It’s as crazy and cosmopolitan as New York; it’s a Paris that’s been placed up high on a plinth and spun around by shot after shot of mountain air.

And Lisbon:

Lisbon is not about the evening. It lives for its light. The city is stretched out along the water and you can smell it even when you are a mile from shore. Fog and clouds sail in, but the ocean keeps it one of Europe’s mildest cities. Instead of Madrid’s scouring winds, there are long, easy days—sometimes weeks—of sun…

The country’s nautical history has brought in a mix of backgrounds, building styles and foods, and there are times when you are walking in cobbled streets when you forget where you are. A trolley rumbles past and you think Boston. San Francisco. Then an insistent sun pushes out from behind clouds, and you remember. Lisbon.

And the different palates of the two cultures:

The Portuguese-Americans on my street eat fish. Good fish, fresh fish. Fish that comes in cans. So when I get to Lisbon I am amazed that locals are obsessed with sweets instead: custards, powdered sugars, delicate cakes.

“Pasteis” is the name here for the pastries and “doces conventuais” (convent desserts) that are laid out in bakery cases all over town…According to Samantha Martins, a hotel clerk I talk to, “Lisbon’s pastries are better than in Paris.” How come? “They are more sweet.” …

Madrid doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth. But this is the birthplace of tapas, those savory, appetizer-sized special dishes that have conquered the world. You can’t get dinner here until after 10 p.m. since tapas bars slow down the clock. Locals take their time over wine and over little plates. When I try some slices of a special Iberian ham called “Jabugo,” I decide that I don’t blame them…

I start eating more. There are anchovies and crushed tomato spread on bread. There are “mariscos” (plates of shrimp and calamari) and “chirrosa,” miniature sausages that are fried in oil tinged with wine or cider.

For more of the author’s delightful comparison of the two cities, check out the entire story.

I enjoy reading the travel writings of Pico Iyer, so I was happy to find this recent article of his about a trip he took to Ladakh, a Tibetan culture in the Himalayan region of northern India.

I knew before I came to Ladakh — the high, dry region in northern India that borders Tibet and is often called ‘‘the world’s last Shangri-La’’ — that I would see one of the planet’s great centers of Himalayan Buddhism, which arrived in the region, in fact, centuries before it got to Tibet. Books like Andrew Harvey’s radiant ‘‘Journey in Ladakh’’ had told me that I would see people living as they might have several centuries ago, in whitewashed houses amid fields of barley and wheat irrigated by glacial snowmelt. And though I’d traveled to Bhutan, to Nepal, to the Indian Himalayas and to Tibet repeatedly over the past quarter-century, I’d heard that Ladakh, the ‘‘land of high passes,’’ as its name means, was the one place where this pastoral existence was still preserved…

Compact, otherworldly and highly magical, Ladakh is the latest secret treasure to dramatize all the paradoxes of civilization and its discontents. Its temples that mock gravity, its khaki-colored stretches of emptiness with small white Buddhist stupas above them, even the tree-lined walks out of Leh were more beautiful than almost anything I’d seen in Bhutan or Tibet itself.

As he often does, Iyer catches the paradoxes of the culture, caught between its past and its future…

For me, in any case, Ladakh seemed a beautifully unfallen place next to the blue-glass shopping malls of modern Lhasa, the global village of pizza joints and guesthouses that is urban Nepal, or long-isolated Bhutan with its chic new hotels. I couldn’t help smiling at the ‘‘He and She’’ shops scattered around Leh’s market, the prayer wheel in the main road that my driver drove around each morning to get blessings for our trip, the sign outside Pizza de Hut that said, ‘‘Thanks for the Visit. God Bless You. Take Care. Bye-Bye.’’ …

Often, as I made such walks, I found myself pushed off the road by honking cars. When I went on a Saturday evening to the Desert Rain coffeehouse for an ‘‘open mic’’ night, it was to find myself the only foreigner among Ladakh’s fashion-conscious teenagers, all fluent in every verse of ‘‘Hotel California.’’

Yet walk just 10 minutes out of town, and you come to shady rustic lanes where people with ancient faces are working in the fields or walking to the temple as if they’ve never heard of Paris (or Paris Hilton). One day I found musicians sitting on the ground among the poplars, playing at intervals while a team of elegant men in black robes took on a team of elegant men in white in a traditional archery competition.

His article reminded me of my own trip to Ladakh a few years ago, which I wrote about in my book, Two Laps Around the World.  You can read an excerpt about my time in Ladakh here. Meanwhile, here is a photo that I took there - a view of the Himalayas as seen from the upper level of a Buddhist monastery.

Thanks to a momentous project by the Gallup organization, we now have for the first time a representative measure of the opinions of Muslims around the globe. The Christian Science Monitor just published a special report that is based on the Gallup Poll of the Muslim World and the results are fascinating.

Since the momentous events of Sept. 11, 2001, countless news stories, TV commentaries, and books have speculated on the causes of terrorism, the attitudes of Muslims, and a purported clash of civilizations between Islamic societies and the West.

What has not been available is any reliable measure of the viewpoints of ordinary Muslims, who constitute 20 percent of the global population.

That is no longer the case. Through an ambitious six-year project that involved hour-long, face-to-face interviews with residents in nearly 40 nations, Gallup has plumbed the perspectives of Muslim men and women – urban and rural, educated and illiterate, young and old.

A few of the interesting findings uncovered by the poll:

•   When asked what they most admire about the West, Muslims pointed to (1) technology, (2) a value system of hard work, self-responsibility, rule of law, and cooperation, and (3) fair political systems, with respect for human rights, democracy, and gender equality.

•   What they dislike the most about the West includes: denigration of Islam and Muslims, promiscuity, and ethical and moral corruption.

•   What they admire least about their own Muslim societies includes: lack of unity, economic and political corruption, and extremism.

•  Large majorities cite the equal importance of democracy and Islam to the quality of life and progress of the Muslim world. They see no contradiction between democratic values and religious principles.

•  Most want neither theocracy nor secular democracy but a third model in which religious principles and democratic values coexist. They want their own democratic model that draws on Islamic law as a source.

There is much more in the full report. You can see additional insights here.

It’s natural to assume that the process of assimilating immigrants into a new society is a difficult one that is only achieved over the long term, if at all. A new study, however, which was conducted by a Duke economist, puts a few dents in that notion. According to this story, today’s U.S. immigrants are assimilating faster than their predecessors in previous decades and centuries - despite starting from a more disadvantaged position.

It’s the American Melting Pot, version 2.0.

A wide-ranging and provocative new study of immigrants’ integration into U.S. society has concluded that newcomers today are assimilating more quickly than their predecessors did 100 years ago — with Cubans, Vietnamese and Filipinos among those leading the way…

The study found that today’s newcomers are at this point less integrated than their counterparts 100 years ago. That’s likely because those immigrants a century ago were largely European, with one of the largest groups coming from England, and thus started out with cultural and economic levels closer to that of native-born Americans. By contrast, today’s newcomers, who are mostly from Asia and Latin America, start off further behind, Vigdor said.

But today’s immigrants are making faster progress. As a result, even as immigration has skyrocketed, assimilation has remained stable, Vigdor concluded. “This is something unprecedented in the United States,” he said.

All the news was not positive, however. The study determined that Mexicans, who are the most numerous of new immigrants, also have the most difficulty assimilating, perhaps because of the continuing immigration debate and the related legal issues.

Mexicans — by far the most numerous nationality — lag significantly behind other big immigrant groups, possibly because a lack of legal status keeps many Mexican immigrants from advancing.

“The bottom line is, there are some encouraging things and some things to be concerned about, but the nation’s capacity to integrate new immigrants is strong,” said the study’s author.

When most of us think of vast deserts and mountainous sand dunes, our mind wanders to the Arabian or Sahara deserts. Few people think of Namibia and sand dunes in the same sentence. But this country on the southwestern coast of Africa is, in fact, known for some of the most stunning sand dune landscapes in the world. Nathan Lump wrote about his experiences in the Namib desert for the NY Times travel magazine.

By the time I reached Kaokoland, I’d been in Namibia for a week, and had grown accustomed to wonder. I’d hiked up the gigantic sand dunes of the Namib Desert at Sossusvlei (said to be the world’s highest), by far the country’s most famous attraction, and found them suitably astonishing. It is hard to overstate the power of seeing these dunes in person — pyramidal with serpentine ridges, tinged red from iron oxide and standing hundreds of feet high so that from a distance they look like mountains.

The silence in this sea of sand is mesmerizing, and it is strange how the repetition of form creates a kind of dramatic monotony, one that makes minor shifts in perspective somehow seem momentous. At sunrise I was struck by how the play of light and shadow emphasized each dune’s individual geometry, while later, as the full sun marked them in sharp contrast to a cloudless blue sky, I suddenly became conscious of the entire network, of how the dunes relate to one another in shape and size to form one of the world’s most surreal dreamscapes.

Do you enjoy living someplace that is walkable? It’s important if you like to walk to restaurants and shops, if you harbor a desire to walk to work, or even if you just enjoy walking for fitness.

The act of walking may also be helpful in much bigger ways. Paul Krugman has a column in today’s New York Times about the environmental and economic benefits of walking and of taking public transit, given fast-rising gas prices. He reported on the topic from Berlin, and had this to say:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require … changing how and where many of us live.  To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Now, of course, some U.S. cities are actually friendly to pedestrians. But which ones? Lucky for us, Prevention magazine has already done a study on this and ranked the best cities in the country (and in each state) based on which were the most walkable. 

In all, Prevention ranked 500 cities. Of these, the top five were Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These just edged out San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu and a few other urban areas for the top spots. Other major cities that scored well include Philadelphia (15), Seattle (23), Denver (24), Portland, Oregon (27) and Austin, Texas (29).

National Geographic has a wonderful feature online - an interactive photo map of China. By clicking on the names of cities or regions, one is transported to a collection of photos from that part of the country. There are 200 pictures in all and they show the amazing diversity, complexity and beauty of the Chinese nation.

Meanwhile, here is one of my own travel photos of China. The Great Wall:

We often talk about the cultures of different regions of the world. We talk less often about the cultures of different regions of one country, though they certainly exist. But what about the psychological characteristics of geographical regions? Is it actually possible that people in New England, for example, have not only different traditions and foods than do people from the Sun Belt, but also a different psychological outlook on life?

Richard Florida thinks so. In a fascinating recent article for the Boston Globe, Florida talked about how certain personality traits actually cluster in particular cities or regions. An excerpt:

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

What’s more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation…

Interestingly, America’s psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.

The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first - was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? - the overlay is clear…

While opposites sometimes really do attract, and it is possible to make unusual matches work, our research indicates that people are typically happier in places with higher concentrations of personality types like their own.

Check out the entire story. There is a lot of food for thought in there.

It’s one thing to take your mother on vacation, it’s quite another to take her to India - for her 75th birthday and her first trip to anyplace in Asia. But that’s just what Jeff Greenwald did. He wrote a charming article about the experience for the Los Angeles Times.

Bringing my mother to India had seemed an inspired idea. I’d wanted to give her something spectacular for her 75th birthday: an eight-day tour around northern India’s signature sites — Delhi, the palaces of Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal — and of the country that had so profoundly altered my own worldview.

My misgivings were equally broad. Not only was this my mother’s first trip to Asia, but she and I had also never traveled together. And although she had been to Israel and Europe, including Russia, India was something else entirely.

Because India, truly, is like nowhere else on Earth. It is not a destination you visit like Paris or Beijing or Barcelona. It’s a place you must surrender to, dissolve into. No matter where one touches down, first contact with it is overwhelming.

How did Mom do in India?

Our last evening in Delhi, as I rode with my mother to the airport, I asked what she’d liked most and least about India. Topping the list was the Taj and Udaipur. For the low points, her answer surprised me.

“I didn’t like taking my shoes off,” she said, “and walking barefoot on those dirty temple floors.”

But India transforms everyone it touches. The axiom was reaffirmed two months after our trip, when I asked my mother how the journey had affected her.

“It’s not for everyone,” she said. “You have to be ready, physically and emotionally, because it impacts every sense. Sight, sound, smell, taste — even the sense of touch, because you have to take off your shoes, and be in contact with the ground.”

“What about the culture?”

“It was like being in another world — but I loved it. I felt very comfortable. And I realized that no matter where I go, what clothing people wear or what traditions they practice, we’re all human beings. We all want the same things: to enjoy our lives, live in peace and be allowed to practice what we believe in.

“There’s no doubt that India changed me. It wasn’t a vacation,” she said with a laugh. “It was an experience.”

Bali, Indonesia

The waves roll into Jimbaran Beach on the Indonesian island of Bali. At night, this beach is a beehive of activity, with dozens of open-air seafood restaurants lining the sands. When we were there during the day, however, the area was nearly deserted and we had an entire stretch of gorgeous beach all to ourselves.

Julie O’Hara recently went to Southeast Asia with her husband, where she fell in love with the foods of Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore. Along the way, she tried to learn as much as she could about the meals, although she knew she’d never be able to exactly recreate the dishes at home. She reported on her adventures for NPR’s Kitchen Window.

Thai food is probably the most accessible to an American cook. Curry paste, lemongrass, chilies and even kaffir lime leaves are widely available, and the techniques for making a slowly simmered curry or a lightning-fast noodle dish such as pad Thai are straightforward…

But go to Singapore and all bets are off. With a diverse assortment of high-quality Malaysian, Chinese, Indian and Singaporean dishes readily available at the city-wide food courts known as hawker centers, we were simultaneously flummoxed and delighted by new foods at every turn.

How about some “carrot cake,” rice flour cakes made with daikon and stir-fried with egg and dark soy sauce? (It’s called “carrot cake” in Singapore because the Chinese phrase for carrot and daikon — a type of white radish — are very similar.) Maybe you’d like a whole crab smothered in black pepper sauce and imbued with the spice’s surprisingly nuanced flavor. Or why not try a spicy bowl of curry laksa, the coconut-based soup with rice noodles, fried tofu, fish cakes and cockles (small bivalves)?

In Vietnam, I was in thrall of the delicately flavored soups, stir-fries and grilled dishes perfumed with aromatic elements such as lemongrass, mint and shallots. I loved the rich clay pot stews in which pungent fish sauce is balanced by a sweet element such as sugar or caramel syrup.

It’s a fascinating tour of Southeast Asian cuisine, complete with a few recipes. I especially liked her description of why she loves to eat local food when she travels:

Knowing so much of the local food we encountered couldn’t be reproduced at home made eating my top travel priority, above priceless art or one-of-a-kind monuments. To my mind, eating the food of a place is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not a lowly, sensual pursuit. You can never duplicate the soil, the water or the air that exists in a particular place at a particular time, not to mention the generations of experience that go into specialties prepared by local cooks.

This is why my pho will never approach the greatness of the bowl I ate in Ho Chi Minh City. This is why real authenticity in travel often comes down to that incredible plate of noodles you get from a street vendor.

Last week, I provided you with a page of information on life sabbaticals. Today I have sort of a companion piece to that, with an overview of round-the-world travel. An excerpt:

Sure, you can spend a few months traveling around Europe. Or Australia and New Zealand. Or Southeast Asia, which is more of a bargain these days than are some more traditional destinations. There’s nothing wrong with any of those choices. But have you considered a round-the-world trip?

Believe it or not, a round-the-world journey is both easier to plan and easier on the budget than you might have imagined. Following is some information and resources to get you started.

Why a round-the-world trip?

*      Well, for one, do you know that list you keep in your drawer of your dream destinations around the world? Can you imagine visiting several of them during a single trip? It’s possible if you plan a round-the-world adventure, which would enable you to skip across several continents on one journey.

*      It’s also a fascinating way to experience multiple cultures back to back. Spend some time in Europe and Africa, or Asia and Latin America, or the Caribbean and the South Pacific. There is also some nice symbolism involved – you travel in a circle around the globe and then return home with an abundance of experiences and memories.

*      Because it’s a dream of yours. Lots of people fantasize about a journey like this, but few of them follow through and make it a reality. You can.

There is much more information on my round-the-world travel page, including tips on planning and budgets, some sample itineraries to get you inspired, and links to additional books and resources.

There was a nice op-ed column in the Arizona Daily Star a few days ago by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, pointing out the need for the military to have training in and an understanding of other cultures. It’s nice to know that at least some members of Congress have this awareness. Here are some key excerpts from her opinion piece:

…in this post-9/11 world our military faces new and unconventional enemies. This different kind of warfare requires skills not normally taught in basic training: cultural awareness and language proficiency…

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca is the Army’s only chartered cultural training center for non-special operations personnel. The center is geared toward training Army soldiers to develop cultural expertise and “cross-cultural competence,” not just awareness. It conducts intensive training for soldiers in languages such as Arabic and Farsi.

Unfortunately, only about 3,500 regular Army soldiers, among more than a half-million active duty personnel, are able to participate in Fort Huachuca’s cultural-training program each year…

This is why I am drafting legislation to increase the number of service men and women with these critical skills. My bill would provide financial incentives for cadets in officer training programs, and reservists taking advantage of GI Bill benefits, to study foreign languages and culture as a part of their academic programs.

Success in the conflicts of the 21st century requires well-educated, well-trained and adaptable warriors — men and women who are as comfortable speaking foreign languages and understanding diverse societies as they are in tracking down terrorists.

It’s always fun to see what various publications think of interesting or emerging travel destinations. So, although BootsnAll actually published this a while back, I was still intrigued to come across their picks for the top 10 independent travel destinations for 2008.

They selected a few excellent locales that are still not quite overrun with travelers, such as Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Queenstown, New Zealand. They also included several other hot spots that are slightly more off the beaten track. Such as:

Morocco — This moderate Muslim country is easily visible and quickly reachable from the southern coast of Spain, but it feels a world away. Quickly pass through the “border-town” city of Tangier and on to Rabat, Fes, or Marrakech for a pleasant cultural shock on a backpacker’s budget…For those with a bit more time, trekking the Atlas mountain ranges makes for an unforgettable adventure mixed with a cultural experience that contrasts nicely with Morocco’s bustling cities.

Ethiopia — Forget what you might have thought about Ethiopia before, this large East African country is not depressing or completely parched. A growing tourist infrastructure is making it easier to discover for adventurous travelers. Having never been colonized, Ethiopia has its own fascinating history and culture, which mix nicely with one of the most impressive networks of well preserved national parks in the world. The Omo Valley in the east provides an unforgettable look at African tribal life today.

Jordan — The Middle East can sound scary and that helps keep Jordan from being overwhelmed with tourists, but this safe and welcoming country where most people speak some English - eco-tourism is quickly catching on - offers a fascinating look at the region with surprisingly few headaches. Don’t linger in the modern capital of Amman. Instead, spend a couple of days in the ancient city of Petra and another couple checking out the stunning desertscapes of Wadi Rum.