[Dean's World] Ron Coleman: State of amazement

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Posted by Ron Coleman:
State of amazement
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1170317249.shtml


                        [1]Welcome from Continental 

   That's what I'm in here in Israel. I left from Newark Saturday night,
   jammed like a kosher sardine into a pleasant and clean -- but still
   jammed -- Continental flight and arrived Sunday afternoon in Tel Aviv,
   half a day of my life gone forever.

   It was worth it.

   I intend to write at length about my trip here, and to integrate the
   blogging with my Flickr site. I've painstakingly uploaded a fraction
   of my pictures to Flickr directly from my BlackBerry Pearl, because I
   can't download them en masse to my host's desktop without the
   BlackBerry desktop software (what a pain!). So the ones that are up
   there now are not necessarily represenative, and they're also not
   color-corrected. But if you want a very small preview, by all means
   [2]go ahead and click. Just promise me you'll come back.

   In short, though, it's been a great trip, and if you have never
   visited here, you really don't have the slightest idea what you're
   talking about if you hold forth on what the country is like. What's
   striking to me is that on my first trip here since before I got
   married -- its' been almost 18 years since I was here -- I can't
   recognize much of what I once considered home. (I studied in Jerusalem
   for about six months.) The country has just blossomed ecomically,
   infrastructurally, technologically, in a way that really puts the rest
   of the Middle East to shame. (That's one reason they hate it, I guess.
   <">All backward people
   resent progress.) And it's not as if it has had distractions, to put
   it mildly, as well as its own self-made headaches. Oil wealth? None.
   Quite interesting what just a drop of Western-style free enterprise
   and democracy will do, however, in what might otherwise be thought of
   as the harshest environment for them.

   Here it is, and then some. More to come.

References

   Visible links
   1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/roncoleman/375671598/
   2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/roncoleman/sets/72157594510115458/

   Hidden links:
   3. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/<a%20href=