Word: monumental
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...where they live on now. The physical proximities of the land, and the hatreds that filled them, were terrifying. Arabs and Jews stared into one another's gun muzzles. The corridor from the Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem was constantly vulnerable -- and still is littered (the wreckage left as a monument and cautionary tale) with the charred shells of trucks and armored cars destroyed as they struggled to relieve the besieged Jews of Jerusalem in 1948. Three-quarters of the Jewish population and all of Israel's major cities, its airports and the bulk of its industry lay within range...
...center of Sofia brims with Old Country attractions--the changing of the presidential guard, streets made from yellow bricks gifted by Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I--but the city of 1.2 million is compact enough for visitors to venture to locales off the beaten track, like the communist monument turned skate park in Borisova Gradina and the Ladies' Market, where average-income Sofians do their shopping. The marketplace of storefronts and open-air kiosks sells everything from clementines to wallpaper to negligees to banitsa, a flaky pastry stuffed with the feta-like "white cheese" used in many Bulgarian dishes...
...goes by Ostravak Ostravski, this man who tells us he is in his 40s and lives in a socialist-era concrete apartment block in the unemployment-stricken Czech city of Ostrava, once a center of mining mocked by other Czechs as a monument to communism. He confesses to a serious drinking habit, and the urge to share embarrassing details from his more-than-ordinary life via a weblog that has become a national sensation. A coffee mug nearby, he types his entries late at night in a hilariously funny Ostrava dialect that in Czech entertainment culture would typically signal provincialism...
...center of Mogadishu is an awesome, ghostly monument to war. The streets are lined with rows of crumbling, freestanding Italianate façades sprayed with bullets, splashed by rocket-propelled grenades and showing clear blue sky where their roofs and walls used to be. Somalia's capital is less a city than a collection of tribal neighborhoods. Its back alleys lie under several feet of dirt and plastic bags, traffic is regularly held up by armed privateers demanding payments, and the air is thick with gunfire...
...Around 9 p.m. on Dec. 31, the kindergarten teacher from Hamburg was grappling with the unnerving news that six bombs had detonated across the Thai capital just a couple of hours earlier, targeting everything from a shopping mall and a supermarket to a bus stop at Victory Monument, one of the city's busiest gathering places. Watching the police comb for evidence at Victory Monument, Martin changed her mind about attending the famous New Year's countdown at the Central World Plaza shopping center. "I heard rumors that there might be more explosions at midnight," she said...