For those of you who are wondering at my conspicuous absence over the last month or so, I am presently on about 75 percent travel. Just back from Cairo, Beirut, Warsaw, Wroclaw (yeah, I'd never heard of it either), Budapest, Bucharest. Looks like this weekend off to Jakarta, Borneo (scenic Balikpapan, for the record), Sri Lanka, and Tokyo. They tell me I can stay home for at least a week after that. I don't believe them. Not for a moment.
A surfeit of adventures and misadventures. Besieged early one morning by wild dogs in Cairo (stuck to the hotel pool for exercise after that one), Israelis bombed the Beirut power plant the day before I flew in, we subsequently watched the lights blink on and off all over the city all evening. Got out just in time for the anti-American demonstrations, but I hear they were sort of half-hearted. Stopped on the road in a cab to the Bucharest, Romania airport at five a.m. by a surly, uniformed gentleman carrying a big gun who apparently wanted a piece of the cabbie's action. I gather he got it.
And for those of you who have not given my absence a moment's thought, well, ya mudda. Anyway, hope you're all well.
The Itinerant TC |
