Word: ottoman
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...takes a lot for me to get giddy over an ottoman--although less so at 35,000 ft. And much less so for a flat bed and my own 21-sq.-ft. "suite"--a good 60% larger than my drone-class cubicle at the office. The amenities kit rivaled a department-store cosmetics counter and contained not the usual pair of amorphous tube socks, but ones with heels. From one of my four windows, Maserati champagne cocktail in hand, I spotted an easyJet plane, its 34 rows brimming with my people: coach folk. But today I had traded my peanuts...
...Sitting in the Ottoman-style grandeur of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem before a show, Hanania and Waraday trade politically incorrect jokes about the belief, popular among suicide bombers, that 72 virgins await the martyr in paradise. "And what do the women get?" muses Waraday, recalling that a 57-year old Palestinian grandmother recently blew herself up. "What would they possibly have told this woman - that she'll have 72 kids who'll call every day and visit once in awhile? I know my Mom would blow herself up for that...
When I first went to Kosovo, as part of a school trip some 30 years ago, I was half-expecting to see the ghosts of the noble knights and wise priests who forged the Serbian medieval empire centuries ago, before the Ottoman army crushed them in the epic battle of 1389. That was the image I learned in school. Instead, my 14-year-old schoolmates and I saw that this mythical and magic land was teeming with grim, foreign-looking folks who made us feel distinctly unwelcome. And we couldn't understand why they seemed so angry and miserable when...
...allow a generation of Palestinians to grow to adulthood knowing only, and hating, the occupation. But in a land so old, 21 years is merely an instant. Civilizations are piled on top of one another (Hebrew, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Hellenistic, Maccabean, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Egyptian, crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, on and on), all the laminations that conquerors have left in the earth there -- a rich debris of meanings and promises and desires. The accumulation of passion and memory, so much of it implicated with God, can make the land seem at times both wondrous and psychotic. There are certain parallels...
...would be understandable if Bulgaria--ancient Roman annex, Ottoman Empire conquest, Soviet Union satellite--wasn't all that welcoming to foreigners. But there I was in Sofia, on my way to the public drinking fountains where locals fill up old Coke bottles with hot mineral water, when a lady pointed out that the bottle of wine I was carrying had broken through its plastic bag. I tucked the bottle back in as best I could and said thank you--good deed done, as far as I was concerned--but the woman kept cheerily talking in Bulgarian as she emptied...