Word: transitions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...kilometers, Peking to Moscow via Ulan Balor, Irkutsk, Novisibirsk and Omsk. Taking the Trans-Siberian railroad shouldn't be this easy. Just allow two weeks in Pecking: After making a reservation at the China International Travel Service (CITS), report to the Russian Embassy to apply for a free transit visa. A week later, pick it up and present it to the Mongolian Embassy, which in a single day will grant you a transit visa for $2, payable only in U.S. dollars. (As a penalty for not recognizing the People's Republic of Mongolia, Americans pay double) Then return to CITS...
Once the French tour group disembarks at Ulan Bator, we are fewer than 35, most of us transit passengers with too little money and foresight to book an Intourist guide and hotel room in Moscow. To be ignored in the USSR is a privilege, but an unsettling one. Outside the window, peasants with produce, families with hampers, and soldiers with duffles reinforce this sense of travelers' limbo. We are insubstantial, unaffiliated. The Russians, much to our disappointment, do not stamp our passports. When we finally leave the country, they collect our visa form and leave us no trace...
James Axton, American and middleaged, serves this conflicted arena. He is a member of a subculture, "business people in transit, growing old in planes and airports." His job: risk analysis of the executives in multinational corporations. But how does one determine the actuarial odds in the Persian Gulf? What is the revolution quotient in Bahrain, the kidnap potential of Beirut? Like expatriates before him, Axton, recently separated from his wife and son, oscillates between the thrill of exotica and the lost comforts of home. One of the Athens-based corporate transients with whom Axton spends ouzo-drenched evenings finds Americans...
...ambitious politician, name recognition is half the battle. By this standard, Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, up for re-election in April 1983, appears to have declared all-out war. She has plastered her name on everything in sight: garbage cans and lampposts, billboards, transit passes, police stations and concert posters. This weekend, for instance, Chicagoans will celebrate "Mayor Byrne's Labor Day Concert and Fireworks," the latest in a long line of personalized events. In this advertising campaign, even the city's name is sometimes omitted, as in "Precinct Headquarters, Jane M. Byrne, Mayor." Said an almost admiring...
Weird, heavy and polychrome, the 15-story Portland Building might be Sarastro's Temple of Isis magically transposed from some second-rate set for Mozart's The Magic Flute into the shadows of banal skyscrapers along Portland's Transit Mall. It takes up the entire block between the Italian Renaissance city hall and the neoclassical Multnomah County Courthouse...