Travels in the Riel World

Ladakh is a fascinating place. A Tibetan Buddhist culture in northern India, it has more in common with such neighbors as Bhutan and Nepal than it does with the country to which it belongs. David Desjardins and his family recently discovered that the Ladakhi landscape is also spectacular and the people are friendly and welcoming. He, his wife and their 12-year-old son recently went trekking in Ladakh, an adventure that David recounted in a story for the Boston Globe.

A high desert plateau pitched between the autonomous Chinese region of Tibet to the east and Pakistan to the west, Ladakh (”Land of High Passes”) is part of India, but has more in common with its neighbors. It is the meeting place of two mountain ranges - the Karakoram and the Himalaya - and of two cultures, Buddhist and Muslim. For centuries, it was an important stop along the ancient Silk Road, but today political tensions to the east and west ensure that most visitors to Ladakh approach it from the south.

Surrounded by mountains, Ladakh was for centuries inaccessible for much of the year, its high passes choked with snow from October through May, often longer. Air travel has changed that, but even today flights are frequently canceled because of bad weather. The region’s high paths and roads are open in July and August. When the throngs arrive, they flock to Leh, Ladakh’s ancient capital and the center of its tourist trade.

Nestled along the Indus River valley at an altitude of 11,500 feet, Leh is where visitors catch their breath. The need to acclimatize, and to organize a trek, usually keeps newcomers in Ladakh’s biggest town for a few days - and for most, that’s more than enough. Leh’s narrow streets and alleys are choked with traffic, shops, and meandering dogs and cattle. Although it had its charms, we were soon eager to strike out for the wide-open country…

So began our journey into the backcountry of Ladakh, where all traffic is foot traffic and life is lived at a slower pace. Our daily routine - rising, eating, walking, eating, sleeping - helped us slow down too, and let us experience the rhythms of Ladakhi life. Passing fields, we heard farmers singing as they worked. Atop mountain passes, we paused as our guides strung up prayer flags and lighted incense. Descending, we picked our way through herds of grazing sheep and dzos, the Ladakhis’ hybrid of yak and domesticated cow. Visiting a town’s temple, we turned the prayer wheels that lined its walls and rested in the presence of centuries-old Buddhist sculptures, gilded in riotous colors that contrasted with the gray-brown terrain outside.

The landscape we walked through was a slideshow of wild, tortured peaks and ravines, mostly tan and gray, interrupted occasionally by purple funneled hoodoos and reddish slashes raked into the hillside. Glaciers sprawled below snow-capped mountains, feeding streams that carved the deep gorges we hiked through.

If you’d like to read a sample of my own experiences in Ladakh, you can check out this section from my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

Mexico seems to have caught the attention of the New York Times. In the past week, the newspaper has published two in-depth feature stories about the country. Luckily, this enables us to vicariously explore two distinct regions of that nation.

First, the travel section published a story on travel in Chiapas as part of its Frugal Traveler series.

In Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’s central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy color, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed from 10 to 13 pesos to the dollar. But Chiapas’s affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travelers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rain forests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

Then, the Escapes section of the Times published a story on the charming town of San Miguel de Allende, which happens to house a fair number of American expatriates.

It had been four years since I last saw San Miguel de Allende, the 16th-century colonial Mexican hill town that shelters a happy crowd of American retirees and part-time residents. I was curious about what time, trendiness and progress had done to this place beloved for its preserved Spanish colonial architecture and aura of timeless charm. Now, sitting in the jardín — the loud, leafy central plaza — I began to deduce a complex answer.

A few weeks before my recent visit, San Miguel had been named a Unesco World Heritage Site, and at a nearby table, a group of Americans were buzzing about that success. Yet from the park bench where I sat, I could see something else that was new: on the facade of one of the carefully preserved old downtown buildings was the unmistakable logo of Starbucks.

This, in a nutshell, is San Miguel these days: balancing in a moment of almost exquisite equilibrium between new and old…

While my wife and I were in San Miguel, an international short-film festival occupied half a dozen venues, the play “Shimmer” was in town on tour, a new bistro opened and there was a gala for a local charity. There was a time when Americans retired to San Miguel for its glacial pace and tranquillity. These days, it’s more like a high-end summer camp for aging boomers.

“It’s like Berkeley for retired people,” said Sally Osbon, 55, who, with her husband, Jim, 64, lives half the year in San Francisco and half in San Miguel. The Osbons, whose three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house is at the edge of the centro, enjoy not only the climate and the golf, but also what Ms. Osbon called the town’s “bohemian feel.”

When I first heard about San Miguel in the mid-’90s, the knowledge was shared by a friend as a precious secret. Soon afterward, on our first morning there, my wife and I ambled through the most guileless and sweet-natured place we’d ever seen, authentic right down to the donkey-drawn carts carrying water and firewood. Its appearance of being unaffected by its own beauty gave it a quality that was irresistible.

Lots to explore in Mexico, as even the NY Times has apparently discovered.

Egypt has a history that stretches back thousands of years. It’s a boon for the tourist industry, which draws millions of annual visitors to the Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings and other such sites, but the country’s long past also has an interesting cultural influence as it seems to induce a sense of fatalism in the people. That’s the topic of a recent essay on Egypt by Michael Slackman in the International Herald Tribune.

Cairo is a city of about 18 million people that is layered with history stretching back to the birth of civilization. The ubiquitous nature of antiquities - stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere, and it is difficult not to find something - has helped mold a collective consciousness, a national identity, that is uniquely Egyptian…

Egyptians, as a group, are extremely patient, though given the growing pressure of daily life, a bit less than they used to be. Their it-is-what-it-is attitude is often attributed to a strong religious faith and a conviction that all events are God’s will.

Yet growing up and living amid so much history has something to do with that view, too; the abundant antiquities in everyday life are a constant reminder of one’s place in time.

People come and go, pharaohs come and go, even President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 27 years, will go, too (though talk of that certainty is discouraged).

No need to worry.

Or as Egyptians like to say, “Maalesh,” which, depending on the circumstance, means “Never mind” or “Oh, well.”

“When other people talk about hoping to see something happen soon, they probably mean within the next few months,” said Aly Salem, an Egyptian playwright. “For an Egyptian, it could mean in the next 50 or 60 years. An Egyptian has a particular pace. His pace is different than an American’s. And a long history can do this.”

Students who take advantage of study abroad programs have a wide variety of experiences. In the best scenarios, they not only have a fun and enriching life experience, but also come away with nuggets of insight into the culture of a new country. That’s what happened for Laura Corser, who was recently profiled in the Boston Globe after spending a semester in Seoul, South Korea.

One of her key insights into Korean culture:

ACT YOUR AGE: “Korean etiquette is highly focused on age and rank. Often the first question out of someone’s mouth (after ‘what’s your name?’) is ‘how old are you?’ One habit I had to acquire (other than taking off your shoes when you enter a house and several restaurants or eating rice with a spoon) was the style of interacting with elders, like serving them with both hands, or with one’s free hand on the arm if only one hand is required.”

For most Westerners, any mention of Kenya as a tourist destination will spark images of safaris. But for those who know of Lamu, Kenya is a very different place. A small island off the Kenyan coast, Lamu contains a quaint old town and miles of deserted beaches that have enchanted many a traveler. In this article, Sophie Lam writes of her own captivating experience on Lamu.

Omar beckoned with a sweep of his arm: “Come, come!” And with that he disappeared around a corner and out of sight again. I trailed him as quickly as I could, but he had vanished. Left or right? The tangled alleyways of Lamu Town served only to confuse and disorient me. The town had looked as small as its transport inventory implies (one car, one donkey ambulance, no roads) when our boat pulled up at the docking jetty of the island’s main port that morning. Yet, like a hall of mirrors, once I ventured into the web of passages it seemed to expand with every corner I turned.

As I stopped to compose myself in an airless alley, my guide Omar’s beaming face reappeared and we continued on our way, deep into the heart of the town. Some passages were barely wide enough for overtaking people; add the town’s itinerant donkeys to the equation and you can imagine the tailbacks. On either side of us, thick-walled, lime-plastered houses soared towards a ribbon of blue sky above. These 600-year-old coral stone buildings form East Africa’s oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement, now part of the Unesco-recognised maze.

Like the shell of a pearl oyster, the rough but resilient exteriors conceal beautifully ornate interiors. A step beyond a wooden door might lead you through to a sun-drenched inner courtyard, hung with jasmine and frangipani, or splashed with tropical fronds.

Here is another small example of the value of educational exchange programs. Several teachers from Indonesia had the opportunity to spend some time at a school in the United States and, according to this story, they came away from the experience with a much different view of the U.S. than they had expected.

Three Indonesian educators entered a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Catholic school two weeks ago expecting what they’d seen in American movies: surly teens, self-indulgent adults and violence. They’ll return home on Sunday knowing a common U.S. expression: Don’t believe everything you see on TV.

“I will tell my students that what you see on TV and film is not reality,” said Veri Muhlis Arifuzzaman, 33, who teaches at a small boarding school in a rural village in West Java, Indonesia. “I feel safe here. The people are warm and have good hearts and can receive us as Muslims.” …

Arifuzzaman, Hanifah and Nuning Nur Laila, 29, of East Java, made their first trip to the United States through an exchange program by the East-West Center’s AsiaPacific Ed program. The goal is for Asian and American educators to learn from each other and abandon stereotypes.

As the global financial system tries to right itself after staggering to the brink of collapse, one banking sector finds itself in somewhat better shape than most of the world. That would be the Islamic banking system, which credits its steadiness to practices that are unique to Islamic finance, such as banning interest and shying away from excessive debt and risk. The Washington Post has a story on the topic:

As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

“The beauty of Islamic banking and the reason it can be used as a replacement for the current market is that you only promise what you own. Islamic banks are not protected if the economy goes down — they suffer — but you don’t lose your shirt,” said Majed al-Refaie, who heads Bahrain-based Unicorn Investment Bank.

The theological underpinning of Islamic banking is scripture that declares that collection of interest is a form of usury, which is banned in Islam. In the modern world, that translates into an attitude toward money that is different from that found in the West: Money cannot just sit and generate more money. To grow, it must be invested in productive enterprises.

“In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air,” said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. “Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold.”

Yes, apparently “The Oprah Winfrey Show” is a hit even in Saudi Arabia, where Oprah has become a source of inspiration to many Saudi women.

When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.

Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence…

Saudi women say they are drawn to Ms. Winfrey not only because she openly addresses subjects considered taboo locally, but also because she speaks of self-empowerment and change.

Wafa Muhammad, 38, a mother of five from Riyadh, said she believed that, in their adoration of Ms. Winfrey, Saudi women are expressing a hesitant sense of longing for real change in their country…

In a country where women are forbidden to vote, or to travel without the permission of a male guardian, a sense of powerlessness can lead women to look for unlikely sources of rescue, Ms. Muhammad explained. “If women here have problems with their fathers or their brothers, what can they do but look to Oprah?” she asked. “The idea that she will come and help them is a dream for them.”

Some countries easily embrace the concept of adoption. In the United States, for instance, adoption has long been commonplace and even foreign born children find easy acceptance in this multicultural society. In some other nations, though, people have struggled with the idea of adoption. This is especially true in a place like Korea, where family and ancestry are a vital part of one’s identity.

The situation is slowly changing, however, as this NY Times article notes. Last year, for the first time, more South Korean babies were adopted by Korean families than by foreigners.

Daunted by the stigma surrounding adoption here, Cho Joong-bae and Kim In-soon delayed expanding their family for years. When they finally did six years ago, Mr. Cho chose to tell his elderly parents that the child was the result of an affair, rather than admit she was adopted.

“My parents later died believing that I’d had an affair,” said Mr. Cho, 48, a civil engineer who has since adopted a second daughter.

Now, with South Korea becoming more accepting of adoptive families, Mr. Cho and Ms. Kim feel they can be more open, with relatives and nonrelatives alike. Ms. Kim, 49, attributed the change partly to the growth of other nontraditional families, like those headed by single parents or including foreign spouses.

“We feel attitudes have changed,” she said.

Just how much, though, is the critical question as the South Korean government is pushing aggressively to increase adoptions by South Koreans and decrease what officials consider the shameful act of sending babies overseas for adoption.

Brazil is a country that is mad for soccer (or football, as most of the world calls the sport). Now, that passionate love for the game has been permanently documented in a new National Football Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. What’s unique about this museum is that it not only celebrates Brazil’s star players and team accomplishments, but it also pays tribute to the sport’s role in Brazilian culture, as described in this article in the International Herald Tribune.

The museum tells the story of both sport and country, where the national pastime has come to represent and inspire the multiracial, samba-loving soul of the people. In Brazil, stuffy European soccer was transformed into “the beautiful game” of magical passing and dribbling that has won the country world renown…

Another room pays homage to Brazil’s fans. They dance shirtless, beating drums to samba rhythms on huge video screens, with cacophonous surround sound that makes you feel as if you are among the crowd.

A sport for the masses is a theme throughout. In one room, a short movie recounts how soccer in Brazil morphed from a country club sport that was socially segregated during Miller’s time, into one that took on the evolving character of the racially mixed working class that was propelling Brazil’s industrialization.

Bolivia is a fascinating nation - one of the highest altitude countries in the world and a place where past and present co-exist in various interesting ways. That’s what Patrick Symmes discovered during a recent visit, which he wrote about for the NY Times travel magazine.

Bolivia is the poorest and highest country in South America, and La Paz is its lively, fermenting main city of 1.5 million, stuck into a cleft in the Andean plateau. High and low, La Paz throngs with a slightly feudal aura, where clothing trends of the 1890s and the 1980s mingle, and politics seamlessly blends the 1960s with the 1690s.

The exotic is right at the end of the block, where at dawn, checking into my hotel, I encountered the end of an overnight festival, with wealthy women in bowler hats knocking back beers and dancing to a brass band. Then a man walked by carrying 10 mattresses on his back. There was a fistfight. Someone emptied a chamber pot from a second-floor window. Todo normal here means 17th-century cathedrals and 21st-century lodgings, witchcraft markets selling disenchantments, eco-tourists packing telephotos and storefront ‘‘mentalists’’ peddling lottery predictions to the hopeful…

There is no doubt that Bolivia is still a hard place, physically, emotionally, aromatically. Compared with the Europeanized societies of neighboring Chile and Argentina, it’s a step back in time, a rustic patchwork quilt of cultures and environments, with large swaths of the country accessible only by beaten tracks and mud roads. (Travel is what Bolivians call imprevisible, unforeseeable.)

But things are getting easier, and today’s visitor is admitted to a particularly sweet spot in Bolivia’s history, a moment when the roads are new but the ways are still old. I’ve had the classic Andean destinations of Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca, and the mountain town of Sorata on my to-do list for a dozen years. Yet only now have Bolivia’s stars aligned to make them not just possible, but possible with the surprising ease and unexpected rewards that mark the best days of travel in a difficult place.

Bathhouses have long been popular in many countries. The Finnish sauna, Turkish hamam and Japanese onsen are all deeply ingrained in their respective cultures. But in South Korea nowadays, the public bath (the jjimjilbang) has undergone a contemporary renovation and provides all manner of social interaction, according to this NY Times story.

Calling the jjimjilbang a bathhouse hardly begins to describe its attractions. “Here, you take a bath and a sauna,” said Kim Eun-yeong, 40, a frequent visitor to World Cup Spaland, one of the city’s largest jjimjilbang. “But you can also eat, sleep, date, watch television, read, play computer games. It’s one-stop total service in the Korean way of relaxing.” …

By the late 1990s, many bathhouses had turned into true recreation complexes, and going to one became as much a part of Korean social life as going to the movies. In 2006, there were more than 13,000 in the country, more than 2,500 of them in Seoul. Some can accommodate thousands of people…

At the front counter, customers pay about 8,000 won, or $7, pick up their top and shorts and a towel and enter the sex-segregated bath halls. There, for an extra fee, they can be scrubbed by a professional using exfoliating mitts.

From the bathing halls, patrons of both sexes dressed in the facility’s “uniform” step out into the common room, which usually looks like a mix of hotel lobby, giant living room and small shopping mall. Some jjimjilbang have karaoke rooms, concert halls, swimming pools, even indoor golf ranges, as well as cafeterias and rooms to watch videos.

But a jjimjilbang’s reputation owes much to its saunas. Some feature heated huts suffused with the aroma of mugwort (important in traditional medicine). Sometimes the walls are studded with jade and amethyst, which many Koreans believe emit healing rays when heated…

But the jjimjilbang are as important for socializing as they are for restorative treatments.

“We don’t consider someone a real friend until we take a bath together,” said Han Jae-kwan, 25, a college student.

His girlfriend, Yang Eun-jeong, 25, agreed: “We women also believe we become closer when we get naked and bathe together.”

The two were playing the board game Go after emerging from a sauna. Since most young Koreans live with their parents until they marry, jjimjilbang have become popular places for couples to spend time together.

“We often come here on a date,” Mr. Han said. “At a cafe, the owner gives you an unwelcome look after a few hours if you don’t order more. But here, you can stay as long as you want.”

I just finished reading a book called “Four Seasons in Rome,” by Anthony Doerr. One the surface, it’s the tale of a husband and wife who move to Rome for a year (for a writing fellowship) with their two children. The catch is that the children are twins and are only a few months old when the sojourn in Rome begins, so the story is really about learning to navigate Rome while also learning how to be a parent to two young boys.

The story is fun to read and has the added benefit of wonderful prose and interesting insights into Italian life. A sample of Doerr’s writing about Rome:

Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life.

And an observation about Italians:

“Italians,” our friend George Stoll says, “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.

I’m always amazed when writers catch my eye with just the poetic power of their prose, and I love to discover random nuggets of cultural insight buried in manuscripts about other topics. On both of these counts, “Four Seasons in Rome” was a good read.

It’s no surprise that the French have a complicated relationship with the United States. One that is certainly reciprocated, as the Americans and the French seem to both love and detest what is most unique about the other’s country. This love-hate dynamic is uniquely examined through the prism of politics in a recent essayby Steven Erlanger in the International Herald Tribune.

An excerpt:

The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.

They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”

But this year has been difficult for the French. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama - black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world - has sent many French into a swoon.

But the combination of two recent surprises - Governor Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown - has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.

These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President George W. Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom.

Even worse, from the French perspective, Americans are reckless optimists, incurably blind to the tragedy of life, to the weary convolutions of history and thus to the need for lengthy August vacations and financial regulations.

The city of Fes, Morocco, has enchanted many a traveler. Tahir Shah was spellbound by the medieval magic of Fes and wrote about the city for the U.K. Guardian.

Walk through the bustle of Fes’s medina and it’s impossible not to be catapulted back in time. It is as if the old city is on a frequency of its own, set apart from the frenzied world of internet and iPods and all the techno clutter that fills our daily lives. Abdul-Lateef and his magic-medicinal stall are a fragment of a healing system that stretches back through centuries, to a time when Fes was itself at the cutting edge of science, linked by the pilgrimage routes to Cairo, Damascus and Samarkand.

These days the low-cost airlines shuttle the curious back and forth to Europe. And everyone they bring is tantalised by what they find. Fes is the only medieval Arab city that’s still absolutely intact. It’s as if a shroud has covered it for centuries, the corner now lifted a little so we can peek in. Once the capital of Morocco, Fes is one of those rare destinations that’s bigger than mass tourism, a city that’s so self-assured, so grounded in its own identity, that it hardly seems to care whether the tourists come or not. Moroccans will tell you that it’s the dark heart of their kingdom, that its medina has a kind of sacred soul.

Wander the labyrinth of narrow streets and you can feel it. It’s all around you - in the meat bazaar, where shanks of mutton nestle on fragrant beds of mint, and it’s down in the most ancient quarter, at er-Rsif, where the seed of Fes fell more than a thousand years ago.

The much talked about Mediterranean diet appears to be in retreat - in the Mediterranean. Yes, strangely enough, the diet full of olive oil, fish and fresh vegetables that is considered one of the healthiest in the world is struggling to maintain a foothold in its home region. The culprit? Fast food. Check out this story in the International Herald Tribune for more.

Dr. Michalis Stagourakis has seen a transformation of his pediatric practice here over the past three years. The usual sniffles and stomachaches of childhood are now interspersed with far more serious conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. A changing diet, he says, has produced an epidemic of obesity and related maladies.

Small towns like this one in western Crete, considered the birthplace of the famously healthful Mediterranean diet - emphasizing olive oil, fresh produce and fish - are now overflowing with chocolate shops, pizza places, ice cream parlors, soda machines and fast-food joints.

The fact is that the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease and cancer, is in retreat in its home region. Today it is more likely to be found in the upscale restaurants of London and New York than among the young generation in places like Greece, where two-thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting, health officials say.

“This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim,” Stagourakis said. “Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents’. That’s really scaring people.”

That concern has been echoed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which said in a report this summer that the region’s diet had “decayed into a moribund state.”

“It is almost a perfect diet, but when we looked at what people were eating we noticed that much of the highly praised diet didn’t exist any more,” said the report’s author, Josef Schmidhuber, a senior economist at the food organization. “It has become just a notion.”

Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have even asked Unesco to designate the diet as an “intangible piece of cultural heritage,” a testament to its essential value as well as its potential extinction.

Eritrea is not a well-touristed place, nor even a very well known country. But Jeffrey Gettleman went there recently with his wife and found it to be a rather interesting destination, with a taste of old Italy mixed with Africa. He wrote about his trip for the NY Times.

Eritrea, for better and for worse, is a nation locked in a time capsule. Visiting here is like spending your vacation in a vintage shop. Old men in dapper Fedora hats and antique Italian shades haunt Harnet Avenue, the palm-studded main drag in Asmara, the capital. The city itself is a showcase for some of the world’s boldest, most whimsical examples of 1930s Art Deco architecture, perfectly preserved by the thin desert air…

Asmara the architectural marvel is not so much the purposeful result of a hard-fought preservation battle. No. There were battles, real ones, and it was Eritrea’s bloody history of conflict and civil war that has kept this little-known sliver of a country along the Red Sea hermetically sealed to the outside world. The result is a surreal, out-of-body tourist experience, where you feel dislocated from just about everywhere else, but euphoric and inspired by what is in front of you. Africa? The Mediterranean? The Middle East? South Beach? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Eritrea feels like.

I came across a great article about a movement that has sprung up in Italy to preserve the country’s culture of cooking and serving good food. Ah, but Italian food is always good, you might say. Perhaps, but the members of the Home Food movement contend that something of the country’s heritage is being lost - the sense that food is about more than nourishment or even taste. Rather, the culture of Italian food, they believe, is about bringing people together and about satisfying the soul.

“I am deeply convinced that one of the best things we have in Italy is our cooking,” says Marcante, 48, married, with four children. “Italy is one of the few places in the world that you move 10, 20 miles and you eat something completely different.” She goes on: “We have such an enormous tradition about the food and we have to absolutely preserve it.”

The Italian Parliament seems to agree. It is trying to protect the Mediterranean diet, citing it as an “intangible heritage,” by reaching out to UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, to recognize it as such.

But there’s a preservation movement burgeoning even closer to the kitchen. Called Home Food, this four-year-old cultural organization collaborates with the University of Bologna in the belief that “good typical food” and civility go hand in hand.

It also believes “good typical food” is disappearing in Italy. Hence, its mission to preserve and promote authentic Italian fare: the traditional recipes, the painstaking methods of preparation, the hug-and-kiss-on-each-cheek delivery…

“Eating traditional, local foods is an experience that brings satisfaction to the palate but, above all, is enrichment for the soul,” says Italian sociologist Egeria Di Nallo in an e-mail. A sociology professor at the University of Bologna, Di Nallo founded Home Food four years ago after being struck by how expedient and global Italian food had become both in restaurants and on the home front. And that, she found civility-shaking.

“Those foods are symbol and metaphor for a traditional way of staying together according to a cultural heritage that we are risking to lose,” says Di Nallo. She goes on: “Home cooks hold the key to our Italian heritage. So our goal is to access that wisdom, keep it alive and share it.”

The best description of the community-building culture of Italian food may come from this quote by Ornella Marcante: 

“Around the table, everything changes,” Marcante explains. “People feel better, more f