As many of you have noticed, the last couple of days have seen some slow blogging. This is partly because the term paper grading season is upon us and I have been spending my spare time blighting the hopes and lives of America’s most promising youth.
But also I’m preparing for a two-week trip to Israel. I will be leaving tomorrow, accompanied by my athletic and intelligent nephew, the ever-resourceful Nick Mead. The program will be a fascinating one; Sam Donaldson, Jim Hoge (of Foreign Affairs), Aaron David Miller and I will all be giving lectures and the group will be meeting with a variety of senior figures among both Israelis and Palestinians. We will get up to the Golan Heights and go down to Masada and the banks of the Dead Sea.
In the hopes that Nick’s technical dexterity will be enough to help his senile old uncle manage some fancy new equipment, I have picked up a camera and a camcorder. With any luck (and help from Nick and the staff back at GHQ) I hope to have pictures and possibly video recordings from the trip up on the site. Over the next few months I have some more travel planned as far afield as Pakistan; part of what I hope this blog can do is to share the experiences I have meeting interesting (and sometimes very challenging and contentious) people all over the world.
Nick and I have seen a lot of the world together; faithful blog readers may remember that he was with me in Belize over Christmas where we all got PADI certified. A couple of years ago we were in Australia where Nick spotted an echidna by the side of the road and we have watched lions devour a giraffe and baby turtles scuttle down to the sea in South Africa. We also saw a female leatherback turtle roughly the size of a couch lumber ashore. I doubt the wildlife will be quite as impressive on this trip; I once remember reading in a travel guide to Kuwait that among its varied wildlife were such exotic mammals as the gerbil. In Israel it is mostly the sheep and the goats. But now that Nick is well into his teens, he is getting interested in politics, so we are undertaking a new kind of tour.
I’ll be blogging from Israel and the Occupied Territories during the next couple of weeks, but I will continue to pay attention to news and events in the rest of the world. With the economic crisis in Europe, the political crisis in Thailand, and the oil disaster in Louisiana, there’s a lot to blog about.
Meanwhile, thank you all once again for your interest in the blog and for your patience when, occasionally, real life breaks in and interrupts the smooth and regular pattern of my daily posts.