You Can Still Enjoy Milos' Beaches, The Discos On Mykonos And Yummy Food on Crete... Before Greece Starts Herding People Into Concentration Camps

For the food, the prices, the diversity and the friendless and honesty of the people, I always preferred Turkey over Greece. I visited both for the first time in 1969 and I've back many times since although, admittedly, more frequently to Turkey. But, now with the violent, neo-Nazi New Dawn party making it unsafe to walk the streets of Athens, Greece isn't a place for American tourists. Xenophobia there is on the rise-- and Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King would feel very comfortable:

"These parasites drink our water, eat our food and breathe our Greek air," Alekos Plomaritis, who was a Golden Dawn candidate running for office at the time, says in Greek, translated into English, in Georgousis' film. "They are primitive, miasmas and subhuman. We don't care about their existence. We are ready to open the ovens. We will turn them into soap, but we may get a rash."

Jews are especially in danger if they go to Greece since the Golden Dawn thugs-- both in Parliament and on the streets-- are outspoken and overt in their virulent anti-semiticsm. Last month the World Jewish Congress warned Jews about the dangerous situation in Greece posed by Golden Dawn.

Are Jews still welcome in Greece?

CNN, though, feels the Greek islands are safe enough to suggest tourists go and enough themselves on one. This week, they asked Which Greek island should you go to? Personally, the only one I ever really liked was Corfu in the extreme northwest off the coast of Albania and far from the luxurious and over-touristed islands in the Aegean Sea favored by Americans. I found Rhodes, Chios and Kos, all off the coast of Turkey, unfriendly and a waste of time in comparison to Turkey itself. And places like Mykonos and Santorini... well, Club Med has never been my idea of a holiday. But it is most peoples'. 230 of Greece's 1,400 islands are inhabited and CNN has some suggestions. "For sheer variety in a small radius," they write, "proximity to Athens' ferry port at Piraeus and the best inter-island boat connections, none compete with the Cyclades. For best scenery, they suggest Santorini.

The story behind this island is the stuff of legends -- in 1600 BC after a volcano erupted and its center collapsed into the sea, it left behind parts of its caldera that today form the island Santorini.

The views from pretty much anywhere on this crescent-shaped outcrop are superb.

Sheer rock faces are striated in multitudinous shades, villages and towns cling to the tops of cliffs, the caldera is filled with clear deep turquoise water home to the visiting cruise liners.

The whitewashed buildings in the main town Fira resemble a fresh blanket of snow atop a mountain.

On the northern tip, at Oia, where the sunsets are outstanding, houses, hotels and churches tumble down the rock walls. Every evening bus loads of tourists descend to watch the sun sink into the Aegean.

The scenery is as just impressive at sea level. Red Beach, as the name suggests, has a rust-colored backdrop and Mars-esque boulders, Eros Beach's eerie hoodoo-like walls would fit right in at a national park in Utah, and Caldera Beach, the only one that faces in toward the caldera, gives visitors a discernible sense of the volcano's immensity.

Where to stay: Vedema, in the village of Megalochori, doesn't have a caldera view, but its setting in a small village feels authentic (the town square and village church are a one-minute walk away).

The 45 rooms have views of the village homes or the surrounding rolling vineyards.

If a vista of the caldera is key, check in to sister property Mystique. Set in Oia, it has a secret wine cellar, and its 22 cave-style rooms are terraced into the cliff face, providing that classic Santorini experience.

Best nightlife: Mykonos

Mykonos is Greece's answer to Ibiza, but without the attitude and posturing.

Either side of the summer season Mykonos resembles another low-key beach destination but come July and August, night owls arrive in droves, and the main streets of Mykonos Town are packed with revelers-- even revelers with babies strapped into carriers.

At times the narrow alleys are so jammed with bodies the only way to move is en masse with the crowd as it sways through the streets in a singular motion.

In true Greek style, nothing here starts until late, though you can party in the daytime with 20-something Italians at Super Paradise beach.

A popular start is to have drinks at sunset at the Sea Breeze Cocktail Bar in Little Venice, snagging a table up the steps for the best views.

Across the island at Kalo Livadi you can find an unfussy beach where the new Nice n Easy bio-restaurant has fantastic organic fare at reasonable prices (the pasta with sharp kopanisti cheese is excellent).

Back in town, Jackie O' is a lively waterfront bar that draws the gay crowd, Agyra Bar has attractive, hard-bodied staff from Athens and at the always packed Rock 'n' Roll, where local and tourists are evenly split, the bartender blows a whistle before doling out oxygen shots.

My personal favorite is the bar/club Caprice, where all are united in their mission to just have fun, no judgments, no agenda; the barmen are as much into the music and dancing as the customers (they'll readily pour free shots of jelly liqueur).

Tip: At Caprice, many a first-timer falls into the area where the bar stools are, set one step down from the rest of the floor, so tread carefully.

Where to stay: Hotel Kivotos, on Ornos Bay, is removed from the hubbub, set on a hill with steps down to a peaceful rocky beach, and is an ideal refuge to refuel and recharge.

The cool rooms have clear Lucite chairs, LED lights in the floors (sounds tacky, but looks appropriately festive), a pool with a small circular bar, and most importantly, an energetic, attractive young staff that will give you the scoop on the best night spots.

Best traditional village life: Naxos

The largest island in the Cyclades has a string of swoon-worthy beaches on its west coast, a Venetian castle in its main town, some interesting ruins and great local produce and dairy.

But what sets it apart from the other islands are its traditional villages.

When you leave Chora, where the ferries berth, the pull of village life is evident-- note the sign at the outskirts of town that simply reads "Villages."

There are 46 of them on Naxos, some miniscule, but all a window into traditional life. Each has a bakery or cafe, a village square where old men with sun-creased faces sit around on tables drinking coffee and trading stories and an immaculately preserved church or two.

The hamlets are tucked among the hills and the switchback road that crisscrosses the island.

Kinidaros is famous for its bakery (the best on the island, the oven fired by wood) and musicians; Chalki has the excellent artisanal jam shop Era; locals come to the cobble-stoned streets of Apeiranthos to eat the crepes at Samardako; Keramoti sits in a valley, seemingly cut off from civilization, but it's also the base for hikes to Routsouna waterfall.

Since most tourists don't venture inland, the villages haven't succumbed to money-grabbing gimmicks.

Where to stay: Set away from the coast, Naxian Collection has good views of Chora, a handful of typical Cycladic white cubist villas with private pools, an on-site organic garden with fresh strawberries and breakfasts large enough to keep you going all day.

The likeable owner Ioannis Margaritis was born and raised on the island, so he knows everything about, and everyone on, Naxos-- literally. If you're lucky, he'll take you to a barbecue at his friend's house in one of the villages.

Best kiteboarding and windsurfing: Paros

The constant wind on Paros is evident as the ferry approaches the island-- you can see giant turbine fans steadily cartwheeling on the north coast.

While Paros might be as cosmopolitan at Mykonos (without the Louis Vuitton and Diesel stores) and pretty enough to attract Hollywood royalty (Tom Hanks purchased a house in the neighborhood, on sister island Andiparos), the real draw here is the force of nature.

During the summer, the Meltemi winds blaze down through the Aegean, supplying welcome breezes for beachgoers, but also creating conditions ripe for windsurfing and kiteboarding.

The winds peak in intensity during July and August; the five-mile channel that divides Paros from its neighbor Naxos funnels the Meltemi to glorious effect.

The main beaches for the sports are Pounda on the west of the island and Santa Maria, Golden Beach (Chryssi Akti), and New Golden Beach (Nea Chryssi Akti) on the east (New Golden Beach's winds are so reliable that The Professional Windsurfers Association held its World Cup there for six consecutive years in the 1990s).

For newbies, mornings are the best time to learn, when the wind is steady but tame. By early afternoon, when the gusts pick up and continue till dusk, pro boarders and windsurfers skim and bounce along the water.

Established operators include Paros Kite Pro Center, Force 7 Paros, and Paros Surf Club.

Visitors should time their visit around the island's most important festivity, on August 15, celebrating the Virgin Mary's ascension to heaven and culminating in a giant fireworks display mounted on boats in the bay of the port town Parikia.

Where to stay: Poseidon of Paros mixes whitewashed Cycladic architecture with flagstone walls, and is strategically poised between Golden and New Golden beaches (you'll see windsurfers shredding the water during afternoon drinks). The place also does a steady business with weddings.

Best beaches: Milos

Every islander has their favorite beach, but none of the Cyclades promises the number and diversity of beaches as volcanic Milos.

Some have white sand, some black, some are rocky, others offer the satisfying sensation of crushed shells underfoot, with water ranging from emerald to aquamarine to cobalt blue.

With a heavily indented coastline (on a map Milos resembles a mutated crab) and pretty little coves at every turn, Milos has about 80 fine beaches, many only accessible by boat.

While each has its charm, some should not be missed.

Sarakiniko, a beach of brilliant white pumice, looks truly otherworldly (many liken it to the moon).

The three beaches of Paliochori are cupped by towering rock formations, its pebbles are multicolored and the sea water has warm pockets where it's fed by hot underwater mineral springs.

The small Tzigrado beach is flanked by headlands, and can only be accessed by boat or by a ladder down the cliffs.

A cave borders the even tinier Papafragas beach, while the rock walls that enclose it give the water the appearance of a river starting in the sand.

At Paliorema beach you can wander around an abandoned sulfur mine plant, see the wagons used to transport the chemical and look for sulfur crystals growing among the rocks.

Where to stay: Since visitors will likely camp down at a different beach every day, it makes sense to stay close to the main port of Adamas where taxis and boats are easy to organize.

Villa Notos has simple rooms in Cycladic colors of blue and white (some have terraces), Greek-made Korres toiletries, pretty views of Adamas Bay and is within walking distance of the town's restaurants.

Best for nature lovers: Ikaria

This rugged, wing-shaped island on the cusp of the Cyclades and named for Icarus -- the son of Daedalus who fled from Crete, got too close to the sun and tumbled into the sea just offshore -- has gained fame for the longevity of its residents.

Their diet, strong community and daily exercise mean Ikarian men are four times as likely as American men to reach the age of 90, according to a study by the University of Athens Medical School.

The 99-square mile island is basically one large mountain, peaking in the central Pramnos-Atheras range. For such a small area, the geographic variation is astounding-- Ikaria has rivers and tiny lakes, high forests of pine and oak, and hills at every turn that combine to make Ikaria an Elysian Field for outdoor buffs.

Ikaria's network of mountain paths known as monopatia is an informal web of routes that connects villages. The hiking guide "Round of Rahes on Foot," published by the local municipalities, details tracks and trails on the west of the island and also maps out a 15-mile tour along monopatia through the hills and villages of northwest Ikaria.

The trek brings hikers through farmland, bush, forest, past lakes, along donkey tracks, skirting goat herds and introduces visitors to the unhurried pace and uncomplicated nature of Ikarian life (this is an island where bakeries use the honor system).

After a hard day of tramping, trekkers can rejuvenate aching muscles at the mineral bath houses of Therma (whose waters, according to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, have the highest concentration of the therapeutic element radon in Greece), or look for the steam rising from various spots around the coast like Lefkada, where heated water emits and joins the Aegean.

Where to stay: Fittingly Villa Dimitri has studio rooms and apartments terraced into a hillside near Armenitis, the steps an ideal preparation for the walks and inclines ahead. Whitewashed rooms have private terraces and views of the Aegean.

Best Robinson Crusoe destination: Koufonisia

Actually two islands, Kato and Ano (meaning lower and upper) Koufonisia, with the former almost uninhabited, are like a land that tourism forgot, mainly because the quickest ferry from Athens takes six hours.

Home to only a few hundred residents, Ano Koufonisi is tiny, just 2.2 square miles, so walking or cycling round the island are the most efficient modes of getting about.

The main industry, apart from the creeping reach of tourism, is fishing, and the main town of Chora retains the feel of an untouched fishing village, with small boats bobbing in the harbor.

There's not a whole lot to do here, but that's the idea.

You can hire a caique (traditional wooden boat) for a trip to the nearby island of Keros, where examples of early Cycladic figurines have been carefully excavated.

Otherwise life settles into a slow rhythm of going to beaches like Finikias, Platia Pounta, Fanos and the naturist-friendly Pori, taking a caique trip to the deserted strands of sand on Kato Koufonisia, or visiting the churches of Agios Nikolaos, Profitis Ilias, and Agios Georgios.

Where to stay:

The white-on-white Aeolos Hotel is close to the port, has bright rooms with flashes of pastel color, and a decent pool ringed by stone tiles.

Best couples getaway: Folegandros

Santorini is often the go-to island for couples in these parts, but another Cycladian island where houses perch on clifftops is an even better escape for lovebirds.

The mountainous, mostly treeless Folegandros doesn't get the crowds of the islands around it thanks to sparser ferry service, a boon for twosomes in search of some solitude with their sun and sand.

The main village of the island, Chora, set on a cliff plateau 650 feet up, embodies the archetypal image of Cycladic buildings of small white houses with blue doors lining cobblestoned street.

The Kastro, the Venetian part of Chora, is well preserved while the majority of the island appears as it has for centuries, devoid of buildings in favor of open landscapes.

Donkeys remain a widely used means of transportation and goats scramble up and down the sun-baked hills. Painters and writers from Europe come to Folegandros for quiet inspiration and the most enduring memories of a visit here are the silence and the bays with crystal clear water.

The one not-to-be-missed site is the northeastern cave of Chrysopelia, where ancient names are written in clay into the walls, a custom from the Hellenistic Period.

Where to stay: In the port village of Karavostasis, Anemi Hotel has a gorgeous infinity pool and a clutch of two-story buildings with rooms that have modern furnishings and exposed wood beams. It also accepts pets.

Best food: Crete

A 90-minute high-speed catamaran ride from Santorini, Crete is Greece's Wild West, where the locals are fiercely independent and have a fondness for guns (used, I'm assured, only to shoot at street signs or into the air during festivities).

Its 3,200 square miles are blessed with scores of microclimates, fertile soil and crops that haven't succumbed to the scourge of industrial farming. Which means that the tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, strawberries, watermelon and other fruits and vegetables that grow here taste as nature intended.

The topography of central mountains ringed by shimmering coastline allows two growing seasons-- lower elevations in the winter, higher elevations in the summer-- and Crete is a hub for olive oil, cheese and wine production.

Eat at a traditional taverna (even a touristy one) or kafenio (Greek café) and you'd be hard pushed to have a bad meal because the raw ingredients are so darned good.

Elounda, on the island's northeast coast, is surrounded by some of the island's great agricultural areas, like the Lasithi plateau, has a selection of hotels for all budgets, and some excellent examples of what makes Greek mainlanders sigh when they think of the divine freshness of Crete's cuisine.

Ergospasio Restaurant, a former old stone carob factory, serves just-caught seafood overlooking Elounda harbor. The Ferryman Taverna is a local favorite, and for reason-- the mezes make great use of Crete's agricultural bounty.

Manolis Kafeneion on the main square is a great spot to share meze and raki (a fiery alcoholic drink made with grapes that locals drink after a meal) with Cretans.

Where to stay: The Blue Palace, just beyond Elounda, has spellbinding views of the Venetian-fortress-turned-leper-colony Spinalonga from its rooms, restaurants and beach. Its Blue Door restaurant does an expert job of recreating an authentic Greek taverna with flavors to match.

Urban Gadabout: Plans come together as I look out over the upper East River esplanade and later walk across 72nd Street

From the esplanade (more properly John H. Finley Walk) of Carl Schurz Park (lower left) we could look out at the lighthouse at the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, which I visited last week on an MAS walking tour, and, farther off, Astoria on the Queens shore, with the bird sanctuary of Mill Rock Park on the left and Wards Island farther off.

by Ken

It didn't quite rise to the level of the way the A Team's Col. Hannibal Smith always used to love it when a plan came together, but that's sort of how I felt last week during a Municipal Art Society walking tour on Manhattan's Upper East Side with Francis Morrone. It's sort of the reason at least some of us urban gadders gad: to make sense of the world around us.

It was in the East 70s and 80s, and all to the east of York Avenue, the north-south street that runs parallel to and east of First Avenue. As a matter of fact, I learned from Francis that York Avenue used to be called Avenue A, and the still-farther-east East End Avenue used to be called Avenue B, just the way the streets to the east of First Avenue in Manhattan's Lower East Side bulge have lettered-alphabet names, creating Alphabet City. I also learned that the name York Avenue has nothing to do with any of the other York place names in the region -- like, for example, New York -- all of which have to do with the Duke of York. No, York Avenue was so named in commemoration of Sergeant York.

The things you learn on these walks! And while I probably only remember about 10 percent, that's still 10 percent more than I knew before!

But I digress. It so happened that the tour meeting place, on a corner of York Avenue and East 76th Street, was right across the street from a branch of a health club I had gone to many, many years ago, since I was working on the East Side then, and that was the closest location. And so every day after work I made my way up there, and on weekends I traveled straight crosstown from the Upper West Side, where I lived then -- or as straight as you can travel with that big park there in the way. At the time, I recall, I had never set foot as far east in Manhattan as York Avenue. And now here was a walk on which York Avenue would be the western extreme.

We proceeded to tiny Cherokee Place, which had been in the tour description and which I'd never heard of. So I was relieved when Francis ventured that 99 percent of New Yorkers never have. And the reward was exposure to the "model tenements" there, known now as the Cherokee Apartments, which were designed according to health objectives involving maximum light and air, and therefore even (or especially!) now have amounts of light and air that are generally unknown now in even the most expensive Manhattan apartments. Francis described the apartments as having "almost too much light," and I remembered that I had once looked at an apartment up the block, on East 78th Street, in the City and Suburban buildings, also model tenements. It was a sixth-floor walkup, and the rooms were tiny, but I remember looking out the south-facing windows, where the 59th Street Bridge seemed almost within reaching distance, and the sun streaming in was almost blinding.

We made our way up to 79th Street and then farther north and east, and eventually we mounted the East River promenade known officially as the John H. Finley Walk. (Naturally Francis made sure we knew who John H. Finley was.) And looking out over the river the first thing I saw was the norhtern tip of two-mile-long Roosevelt Island, which sits in the River between Manhattan and Queens from roughly 46th to 86th Street, and which I had just walked the weekend before on the second of two MAS Roosevelt Island walks, this one the "northern route" -- up to the lighthouse at the northern tip, or almost. We learned from tour leader Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, that because of Superstorm Sandy damage, which was considerable on the low-lying island, you can't get to the lighthouse, which is actually on a little island of its own, and the two little bridges that connect it had washed out, with their repair still trapped in an administrative boondoggle.

Beyond Roosevelt Island, in clear view was the Queens shore of Astoria, with the inlet where Jack Eichenbaum had explained -- on a walk up the Queens shoreline that I've done twice with him -- that this is the southernmost point in Queens where a ferry was possible, for the obvious reason that Roosevelt Avenue blocks the way farther south. (Also, Jack pointed out, at the time when ferries beetween Manhattan and Brooklyn were becoming so important to commerce and development, there was nothing that far north on the Manhattan side worth ferrying to or from.)

Off to the left was notorious Hell Gate, the infamous strait between Astoria and the now-combined Wards Island and Randall's Island, which are traversed by the Triborough now (RFK) Bridge that joins Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx (with the Hell Gate Bridge, a railroad crossing, just visible in the distance. Closer to us in the direction of Wards Island was little Mill Rock Island, now a city park, notably chiefly as a habitat for wildlife, which as it happened I'd had a chance to view close-up just a few weeks earlier on a New York Water Taxi EcoCruise up the East River beyond Wards and Randall's to and around the now-abandoned North Brother and privately owned South Brother Islands. (The captain took us on a different side of Roosevelt Avenue on the northward and southward legs of the trip, so we saw both sides of the river.) And come to think of it, just a few months before, I'd done my most recent circumnavigation of Manhattan, chugging north past the very point where I was standing, on up the Manhattan shoreline into the Harlem River.

As I say, it wasn't really planned, this confluence of al those gadding experiences, but in a sense it was, because each of those trips had been undertaken as part of my ongoing project, as a life-long map obsessive, to (finally) get some real-world images and tread some real-world turf to bring those maps to life. After we finished that walk last week, seeing the higlights of Carl Schurz Park, which contains within it the NYC mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion, which is separately administered (and for which I must make a note to schedule one of the tours offered there, which Francis says are extremely good, especially while there's no mayor in residence, the current officeholder being our first mayor for whom residence in Gracie Mansion would have been a step downward), I circled back to Finley Walk and just sat for a while, on that picture-perfect late Sunday afternoon, just enjoying the view, and enjoying how all those pieces had come together for me.

ACROSS 72nd STREET WITH MATT POSTAL

Then yesterday another MAS tour group assembled at Park Avenue and East 72nd Street for a walk that Matt Postal explained he had led once, seven years ago, and not since. The idea of simply walking across 72nd Street, including walking through Central Park, all the way to Riveside Drive at the Hudson River, sounded intriguing enough. Little did I know, though, how strong a role 72nd Street, which barely existed at the time that Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead had had for it when they were conceiving their plan for Central Park in the 1850s. In reality, of course, 72nd Street is only maybe a quarter of the up the north-south length of the park, but from the start it had the feel of a sort of "central" east-west axis, which is how Vaux and Olmstead conceived it, with vehicular entrances (tough the vehicles they envisioned would all have been horse-drawn) on both the east and west sides of the park, which laid the way for the development of both the East and West Sides relative to the park.

But that's not all. At the far end of West 72nd Street, Matt pointed out, lies the start of Riverside Park, and he explained that Vaux and Olmstead had always thought of 72nd Street as a connecting boulevard between the two great parks -- and Riverside linking to a network of parks to the north and circling around to the parks along the rift fronted by Saint Nicholas Avenue in Northern Manhattan and then . . . back to Central Park! And suddenly a whole new vista, a whole new way of thinking about all that park space, opened up to me. Along the way, both out of Central Park and in, Matt pointed out a selection of the kinds of things he normally does, and though I lived on West 75th Street for more than 20 years, I saw things in my old neighborhood that I'd never been aware of. We finished up at the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial at the foot of Riverside Park, at 72nd Street and Riverside Drive. Matt pointed out -- obvious enough, once you've had it pointed out -- that the statue of Eleanor sits directly on the ground, without a pedestal, and it's remarkable what a powerful humanizing effect that "no pedestal" feature has.

Naturally we were well entertained along the way, on both Francis's East Side walk last week and on Matt's 72nd Street walk this week. That you can count on with them, along with counting on learning all sorts of stuff you wanted to know and even more stuff you didn't know enough to know you wanted to know. I try to make sure that all the tour leaders I especially value hear periodically how grateful I am for what the do. I worry that it's not often enough.

SPEAKING OF MAS TOURS . . .

The schedule for September, October, and November is up now on the Tours page at mas.org. On my first pass, I found something like 29 tours I hoped I might be able to do. There should be lots of stuff for all tastes on the schedule, and at $15 for members, $20 for nonmembers, they're still an amazing value. If you see something you know you want to do, it's a good idea to register sooner rather than later.

AND SPEAKING OF FRANCIS AND MATT . . .

A few weeks ago Francis and his co-author, Robin Lynn (a former MAS director of tours), were guests of honor at a public book-launch party held in the beautiful Historical Chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. (The chapel was designed by Warren and Wetmore, whose credits include Grand Central Terminal.) The book (pictured above) is Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes, and in recent times Francis has been doing a lot of MAS tours on the subject, and insisting that it's revitalized and exploding urban landscapes are now becoming perhaps the city's defining feature in the outer world.

The Green-Wood people had in fact provided important support for the book, for the obvious reason that when it comes to New York City urban landscapes, Green-Wood stands at the beginning of time. In the city's early history, cemeteries provided a lot of residents with their only opportunity for "getaways," and often involved a day trip with picnic lunch, with or without a dead relative to visit. A carefully fabricated reinvention of a selection of natural environments was the basis for the design of Green-Wood (which sits astride a portion of the terminal moraine in Brooklyn, with what must have been -- in pre-development times -- spectacular views of the harbor), and it clearly served as a starting point for Vaux and Olmstead's designs for the city's first great parks, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Francis did a terrific presentation tracing four stages in the evolution of the city's thinking about urban landscapes, with new thinking about parks and the way they should or shouldn't relate to their surroundings replacing older ways of thinking in cycles. It occurred to me that you can build fine parks according to any of these philosophies, and also not-so-fine parks. For all sorts of reasons you couldn't build Central Park or Prospect Park today, but is it possible to imagine the city without either of those magnificent spaces? Happily they're both in better shape now than they've probably ever been.

As for Matt Postal, it happened that when I was ordering Robin and Francis's book, and looking for something lift my order into the "free shipping" zone, I noticed a book I'd somehow never been aware of, a 2009 MAS-instigated book called 10 Architectural Walks in Manhattan, half by Francis and half by Matt. I don't know how I managed not to know about it, but I'm having a lot of fun with it now. It's great for parts of Manhattan that I have walked with them (among other reasons to fill in some of the 90 percent I've forgotten) and also for areas I haven't. There is, for example, a block of lower Greenwich Street that I walk through almost every morning coming out of the Rector Street IRT station, which was once the heart of the young New York City's most fashionable residential district. With the incision for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel this stretch of Greenwich Street has become a sort of wilderness. I learned a lot about it from Joe Svehlak's MAS tour of "Manhattan's Lower West Side," and even more from the portion of one of Francis's walks that covers these blocks.

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Still Not Time For A Vacation In Yemen

Yemen seems like an interesting place to visit. So far the closest I've come is listening to Ofra Haza's music and sitting around a kitchen table in Los Angeles and talking with her before she passed away. In 2009 we looked into how safe it is to visit Yemen-- short answer: it's one of the world's 10 least safe countries--and in 2011 we suggested postponing your trip to see the mud skyscrapers until after the revolution. I think I better update that; wait til your next lifetime. Back in 2011, the State Department was very clear:

The Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the high security threat level in Yemen due to terrorist activities and civil unrest. The Department urges U.S. citizens not to travel to Yemen. U.S. citizens currently in Yemen should consider departing Yemen. The Department of State has authorized the voluntary departure from Yemen of the family members of U.S. Embassy staff and non-essential personnel. This replaces the Travel Warning for Yemen issued October 15, 2010.

...The security threat level in Yemen is extremely high due to terrorist activities and civil unrest. Piracy in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean is also a security threat to maritime activities in the region. Terrorist organizations continue to be active in Yemen, including Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The U.S. government remains concerned about possible attacks against U.S. citizens, facilities, businesses, and perceived U.S. and Western interests. There is ongoing civil unrest throughout the country and large-scale protests in major cities.

Guess what the U.S. (and the Brits) are telling their citizens in Yemen this week. GET. OUT. OF. DODGE... NOW! Two planefuls of American citizens were evacuated from Yemen Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the high security threat level in Yemen due to terrorist activities and civil unrest. The Department urges U.S. citizens to defer travel to Yemen and those U.S. citizens currently living in Yemen to depart immediately.

On August 6, 2013, the Department of State ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government personnel from Yemen due to the continued potential for terrorist attacks. 

U.S. citizens currently in Yemen should depart. As staff levels at the Embassy are restricted, our ability to assist U.S. citizens in an emergency and provide routine consular services remains limited and may be further constrained by the fluid security situation. This supersedes the Travel Warning for Yemen issued on July 16, 2013.

The security threat level in Yemen is extremely high. In September 2012, a mob attacked the U.S. Embassy compound. Demonstrations continue to take place in various parts of the country and may quickly escalate and turn violent. U.S. citizens are urged to avoid areas of demonstrations, and to exercise extreme caution if within the vicinity of a demonstration. Terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), continue to be active throughout Yemen. The U.S. government remains highly concerned about possible attacks on U.S. citizens (whether visiting or residing in Yemen), and U.S. facilities, businesses, and perceived U.S. and Western interests. A U.S. citizen was attacked and killed in Taiz on March 18, 2012 and the press reported that AQAP claimed responsibility. An ongoing risk of kidnapping exists throughout Yemen. In the last year, international and local media have reported several kidnappings of Westerners. Violent crime is also a growing problem; local media reported the murder of two U.S. citizens in Taiz and Aden in 2013. In addition, piracy in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Indian Ocean is a security threat to maritime activities in the region. See our International Maritime Piracy Fact Sheet.

...U.S. citizens remaining in Yemen despite this Travel Warning should limit nonessential travel within the country, make their own contingency emergency plans, enroll their presence in Yemen through the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), and provide their current contact information and next-of-kin or emergency contact information.

Why all the concern? Who remembers Ayman al-Zawahri? He took over al-Qaeda when bin-Laden was killed in Pakistan. And he personally ordered a big Ramadan mayhem spree. That's why Obama closed two dozen embassies and consulates in the Middle East last week-- and why they're still closed and why U.S. citizens, tourists and otherwise, are being told to stay away. NSA intercepted some electronic messages-- which is their job (rather than spying on American citizens in the U.S., which is NOT their job and not constitutional). The conversation between al-Zawahri and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who was part of a mass breakout from a prison in Sana in 2006, indicated that a big bang was ordered in Yemen.

Al Jazeera is reporting that a U.S. drone strike killed at least four al-Qaeda fighters in Yemen's Marib province and that one of them, Saleh al-Tays al-Waeli, was wanted in connection with al-Zawahri's Ramadan plot. Drone strikes have killed 17 people in Yemen last week. The BBC is reporting that al Qaeda fighters have been converging on San'a to implement the plan.

The source described the plot as dangerous, and suggested it was to include explosions and suicide attacks aimed at Western ambassadors and foreign embassies in Yemen, in addition to operations aimed at the Yemeni military headquarters.

I bet a nice shiny hotel catering to Western tourists would be a bad idea too; just a guess.

Urban Gadabout: Summer gadding around the outer boroughs of NYC, with news from MAS, Jack Eichenbaum, and the NY Transit Museum

Lighthouse Park at the northern tip of Roosevelt Island -- we'll be there tomorrow evening for the Municipal Art Society's walking tour, Roosevelt Island: The Northern Route.

by Ken

I haven't been writing much about my late-spring and summer wanderings, but after my enforced decommissioning in late April and May, I've been getting my rhythm back, and having some especially good times outside Manhattan. In fact, including tomorrow night's Roosevelt Island: The Northern Route (7/26, 6pm -- an evening tour, note), with Roosevelt Island Historical Society president Judith Berdy (who a few weeks ago led us on a terrific walk through the "Southern Route," down to the new Four Freedoms Memorial at the island's southern tip), I'll have had something like nine consecutive excursions over seven weeks outside Manhattan, including neat destinations like City Island, the tiny island off the coast of the northeasternmost Bronx, and the Little Italy along the Bronx's Arthur Avenue, both Municipal Art Society tours.

I actually undertook a walk less than four weeks after total-knee-replacement surgery, because I'd been wanting to do Joe Svehlak's tour of the few remains of Manhattan's once-thriving Lower West Side, a neighborhood that was basically to make way first for the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and then the World Trade Center. I've done a lot of tours with Joe, both his own and other tour leaders' -- and who should I run into on the Lower West Side tour but another of my favorite tour leades, urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum?

There's exciting news from Jack, maybe the most exciting New York tour news of the summer, but we'll get to that. Meanwhile I'm delighted to see that Joe is repeating his tour of Brooklyn's Sunset Park: The Old Neighborhood (Saturday, 8/31, 10:30am), where he grew up and later became a first-time property owner. I'm a huge fan of Joe's neighborhood tours (I still kick myself for missing his walk through Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood but loved the follow-up tour of Ridgewood, straddling the Brooklyn-Queens border), which provide a great feel for the way geographical and historical factors have shaped development as well as a feel for the way area residents live their lives.

Joe pointed out, by the way, that in his time Sunset Park wasn't yet a neighborhood in its own right, but was "the Sunset Park area of Bay Ridge," which then covered the full four miles or so of Brooklyn's waterfront along New York's Upper Harbor, down to the Verrazano Narrows. And the day after Joe's Sunset Park tour, Melanie Macchio will be leading a walk in Bay Ridge: Brooklyn's Western Waterfront Neighborhood (Sunday, 9/1, 4pm) -- I can hardly wait for that one! (The Bay Ridge walk means I won't be able to do another of architectural historian Tony Robins's patented art deco-themed tours, Art Deco on Central Park West; Sunday, 9/1, 2pm.)

Even though I did it last summer, I'm tempted to redo Norman Oder's Atlantic Yards: Urban Debate, Arena Debut (Saturday, 8/3. 10am), now that the first-completed part of the massive Brooklyn development project, the Barclays Center arena, has been open for nearly a year and is in full swing. Of course, as Norman, who has been the blogger most assiduously tracking the fairly squalid (and often flatly illegal) history of the project, stressed last year, when the arena was just opening, we won't know how seriously it will impact the immediate and surrounding neigborhoods until the serious parts of the develoment, the money parts, the 16 planned towers, are built and functioning -- if they ever all are.

One of the more suspicious aspects of the development is the way the modest concessions to the community which probably made it possible to finally get the project going don't kick in until virtually all of the planned development is completed, which may never happen. There doesn't seem to be much question that there will be enough towers built to alter the lives of everyone living in the area now, but that by itself won't trigger the community concessions.

Last summer I loved Norman's Atlantic Yards walk and presentation, which really gave us an immersion in the welter of issues raised in and by the project. I was all the more impressed since my attention was serious compromised by clock-watching even as we were walking farther and farther in the wrong direction to help me make the rendezvous for Francis Morrone's walk through Red Hook, the low-lying area on the western Brooklyn shore that would soon be devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

As it happened, i didn't make the start of the walk, but did manage to catch up, as did my friend Laurence Frommer, who had also been on the Atlantic Yards walk and had separately made his frantic way from one tour to the other. Laurence is an MAS tour leader himself, and I've been on countless tours with him, both his own and other tour leaders'. Earlier this summer he did a series of Pride-themed LGBT walks. This weekend he continues his exploration of the city's new phenomenon of cultural districts with a walk through the South Bronx's Mott Haven Cultural Corridor (Sunday, 7/28, 2pm-5pm -- yes, it's three hours). Then next weekend he's doing a pair of tours, Off and Off-Off Broadway, Parts 1 and 2 (Saturday and Sunday, 8/3 and 4, 3:30pm each day).

Let's see, I still have a tour coming up with Harlem (and Uptown Trinity Church Cemetery) maven Eric K. Washington: namely, Manhattanville: Recalling a Neighborhood's Activist Heritage (Sunday, 8/11, 1pm). I've really wanted to do a tour of this West Harlem neighborhood with Eric, and last time had it sell out on me before I realized I hadn't registered! Eric is also doing a Harlem Week edition of his terrific Harlem Grab Bag walk (Saturday, 8/17, 11am).

I'm also signed up for Bedford Stuyvesant's Eastern District (Saturday, 8/24, 11am) with architecture bloggers Suzanne Spellen and Morgan Munsey, who I'm happy to see have become MAS mainstays specializing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area (and related areas). The next day they're doing Stuyvesant Heights Expansion District (Sunday, 8/25, 11am).

Staten Island will be represented too, with a two-part investigation of the north shore led by lifelong Staten Islander Georgia Trivizas: Part 1, basically the St. George area (I thoroughly enjoyed an earlier version of this walk with Georgia), tomorrow (Saturday, 7/27, catching the 10:30 Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan); with Part 2, the northwestern shore around to Snug Harbor, to follow (Sunday, 8/18, also catching the 10:30 ferry).

AS FOR JACK EICHENBAUM . . .

As I've said, I've probably learned more about how the underlying geography has conditioned the development of New York City neighborhoods from Jack Eichenbaum, a geographer, than from anyone else. I've still got a summer tour with Jack coming up, and it should be fascinating: Willets Point (Saturday, 8/17, 4pm), "a sewerless hardscrabble area of auto junkyards and related businesses" lying between the Mets' baseball stadium (now-gone old Shea Stadium and now-functioning Citi Field) and now-booming Flushing, a sort of wasteland "that has twice beaten back attempts at redevelopment." Once again the developers have their beady eyes on an imagined wonderland. "We’ll walk to the area from central Flushing," Jack says, "to
understand its important setting, confront ecological issues and learn why
'Willets Point'  is a misnomer."

The September-November MAS schedule won't be announced till, probably, mid-August, but Jack has tipped his mailing list off that he has some tours coming up: Forest Hills to Corona (Saturday, 9/7, 4pm), Maps, Realities and the People's Palace (from the exterior of Grand Central Terminal to the interior of the New York Public Library, specifically the Map Division; Saturday, 9/14, 11am), Flushing's Koreatown (Saturday, 10/19, 11am), and Astoria (Saturday, 11/23, 11am).

But the really exciting development I referred to earlier is an addition to Jack's famous all-day expeditions built around a subway line. He has been doing The World of the #7 Train annually for a number of years now, and not that long ago revived his Day on the J. Now he's taking on Brooklyn's Brighton Line (Howie's and my old subway connection to "The City" in our Brooklyn years).

BRIGHTON LINE MEMOIRS -- meandering off the Q train

Saturday, September 28, 10am-5:30pm

This is a series of five walks and connecting rides along what was once the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island RR dating to 1878. Walks take place in Prospect Park, Brighton Beach, along Avenue U, in Ditmas Park and Central Flatbush. Lunch is in Brighton Beach where you can picnic on the Boardwalk. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address). Get the full day’s program and other info by email jaconet@aol.com. The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

Those who didn't know about Brighton Line Memoirs -- meandering off the Q train or weren't able to register when Jack originally intended to offer it, on July 21, are benefiting from a blow of misfortune he suffered this summer: a knee injury that didn't ground him but made it medically inadvisable for him to be on his feet so long. So he has rescheduled this exciting outing for the end of September when, as he notes, it will also be cooler.

I had my check in the mail the day the tour was originally announced, but the delay also helps me. I'm hoping that by the new date my leg will be a good bit stronger. (I also would have had walking tours on back-to-back days, something I've found I don't do so well yet.)


OH YES, THE TRANSIT MUSEUM STILL HAS
ONE MORE NOSTALGIA RIDE THIS SUMMER

I've also had a busy summer with NYTM, including a vintage subway-and-bus trip to the Bronx's Orchard Beach (on a day that turned out to be singularly un-beach-friendly). The third of the summer's three popular Nostalgia Rides is still coming up.

THE BRONX EXPRESS: VOYAGE TO VAN CORTLANDT PARK

Sun, Aug. 25, 10 am to 5 pm – Tickets
Non-members Adults $50 / Children $25 Museum Members Adults $35 / Children $20

Venture uptown on our WWI-era IRT subway cars to spacious public grounds at Van Cortlandt Park, the third largest park in NYC. During a 3-hour layover, explore Van Cortlandt House Museum and a stroll along the John Kieran Nature Trail. Pack a picnic blanket and “staycation” with us!

Information on Municipal Art Society walking tours is ridiculously easy to find. Just go to mas.org and click on "Tours." Preregistration is required, but you can probably do it online right up to tour time. For New York Transit Museum tour information, go to the Programs and Excursions page of the website. For information about Jack Eichenbaum's activities, and to sign up for his e-mail list, visit his website, "The Geography of New York City with Jack Eichenbaum."

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The best thing showing lately on my TV has been Michael Palin's "Sahara" and "Himalaya"

I've just finished watching the 2004 film of Michael P's epic 2003 journey through the Himalaya and surrounding regions. The map above should be intelligible enough (you should be able to click to enlarge it) to suggest the scope of the journey, except that the copy of the book covers over the early segments in Pakistan and India.

by Ken

I've written about my excitement at rediscovering the early Michael Palin travel-trek series on British DVDs. (Even now that they're actually readily available in U.S. editions, the U.K. ones are still way cheaper.) Of course you have to have a multi system DVD player, but there's an advantage there as well: For HD, my Panasonics (I bought a second one during my recent medically induced hiatus) up-convert from the higher-lined PAL versions, and look pretty darned good on my first HD TV, another product of that hiatus.

And I had the new TV just in time to go back and rewatch the first episode or two of Michael's grand Himalaya series, where the scenery is so mind-boggling. I mean, the show starts in the Khyber Pass! I mean, I never dreamt I would ever see the Khyber pass, and now here it is (video below), with Michael P standing right there talking about it, on my own TV!

Confession: I got stalled with the Palin videos some time back, when I ran into Hemingway Adventure. Even if one doesn't share that "thing" for Hemingway that Michael is far from alone in possessing, you'd think that locales like Key West and late-revolutionary Cuba would be interesting enough in their own right to get me through. And maybe someday I'll go back and find them so, but as presented, as reflections of this or that part of Hemingway's journey through existence, they drove me crazy.

And in this case, the accompanying book didn't help, because it's still imbued with Michael's Hemingway "thing." I find that not many people, even Palin fans, know about or understand the books that have been written and published to supplement each of his travel series. The books, based on his obsessively detailed diaries, are his own re-creations of the making of the journeys. Naturally there's overlap with the edited TV series, but usually even when the same visit or interview is present in both film and book form, there's information or perspective from one that amplifies the other. And there's a great deal in the books that doesn't appear in the edited series.

When I finally restarted my Palin-viewing habit, with Sahara, I was surprised to find that I hadn't acquired the book -- I thought I had them all waiting for me. But I found a really gorgeous hard-cover copy dirt-cheap on Amazon, and had it in time to supplement my televiewings, still on my old 31-inch Panasonic CRT TV, of course. (And the hard-cover version is definitely a plus. I've got paperback versions of some of the others, but for Basil Pao's photos, you want the better reproduction of the hard-cover.)

And Sahara is a fabulous journey. I had seen parts of an episode or two of the series way back when on the Travel Channel, but not enough to make sense of it. The series encompasses a staggering range of terrains and cultures, starting north of the Sahara -- starting in Gibraltar, where happily for us Michael had never been, then proceeding by ferry from Algeciras across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, then across the mountains and finally encountering the Sahara (it fascinated Michael that this vast little-known terrain existed so close to Europe), spending time with the exiled Polisario rebels from Western Sahara and on southward, then swinging east and finally heading north through Algeria and Libya before Michael revisited the once place he'd been before: Tunisia, where Life of Brian was filmed, then across the then-still-highly dangerous northern coastal region of Algeria and eventually back to Spain.

As always with a Palin journey, the primary focus is on the people encountered along the way. The locals hired or pressed into service as guides are almost always fascinating, and nearly always Michael's own cultural openness and curiosity leads to glimmerings of contact with and understanding of people who live lives that seem, and sometimes really are, so different from our own. The people, however, aren't so different. And one couldn't ask for a better travel companion (or surrogate) than Michael, with all that gentle humor to go along with the insatiable curiosity about people.

When I finished Sahara, I was all primed for Himalaya, but despite the shock and delight at finding myself transported straightaway to the legendary Khyber Pass, I wasn't initially enchanted by the first couple of episodes. I mean, a grand gathering of locals from two fairly distant villages in, as I recall, the Pakistani Karakoram, for a no-holds-barred polo match? (The play without rules.) And then there was cricket -- or was it rugby, or soccer? Whatever the hell it was, who cares?

I applied a double rescue strategy. First, as noted, I now had the new TV in place, a perfect excuse to double back. But also, since I indeed already had the accompanying book (also in hard-cover!), and now I had the idea of reading the book ahead of watching the film, and I have to say, it did seem to give me a more involving sense of who the people encountered were and why we might care about them and their ways of life. And with the book under my belt, I was also happy to encounter a number of the "Extended Scenes" that are offered for each of the six episodes.

Indeed, I came to think that Himalaya represents such an enormous journey, encompassing not just the mountains to the west of the stupendous Himalaya, the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, but a significant chunk of lowland Pakistan and India, and the pretty much the whole of the Himalaya range (with significant coverage of Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan), and the previously unknown-to-me far-eastern stretch of India bordering Myanmar (Burma), called Nagaland, leading naturally into the lowlands of Assam, and finally lowest-land Bangladesh, where such great waters of the Himalaya as the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers wash not just the water but the rock and soil of the mountains into the plain and delta emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

(In Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, by the way, we get a vivid sense of how different the Bengalis are in their Muslim identity from their various Pakistani coreligionists. I should add that differences of and conflicts in religion and politics, which were rife in this region in 2003, when the journey was made, and of course still are, are handled with breathtaking evenhandedness and sensitivity.)

Do I have to add that virtually all of these are places I never imagined seeing? Tibet! (Everest is actually seen, not from the familiar south side in Nepal but from the far less known northern face.) And not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, as the former country has been known since it was annexed by the People's Republic of China, but additional portions of the massive Tibetan plateau in the PRC itself. It's such an immense journey that boiling it down to six hours of TV must have been agony.

It may seem contradictory to suggest that at the same time an awful lot of the people and places visited aren't all that memorable, and yet have to be represented to fill out the picture of the travel path -- and again the combination of book, film, and DVD extended scenes proves immensely helpful. One common thread is that in countries that are heavily Muslim, heavily Hindu, and heavily Buddhist, there is an enormous amount of religion, about which Michael is magnificently tolerant and inquiring, but a viewer may be a lot less sympathetic. The thought of visiting one more temple or one more monastery becomes all but unbearable. Ditto the assortment of pointless festivals we partake in along the trek. It is, of course, what people do to fill out their lives, and I don't mean to suggest that their versions of these things are less meaningful than ours. Quite the contrary. But it does take its toll on one's armchair-travel stamina.

In the course of watching these six packed hours I did a lot of backtracking, but I suspect that the whole thing may look very different the next time through, and the next. There is, by the way, an extended interview added to the special features on the third DVD in which Michael talks about the whole journey, including the story (also told in the book) of how they managed the final shot of Michael sailing off in a tiny boat into the sunset on the Bay of Bengal.

Already in Himalaya, filmed in 2003, Michael displayed a keen awareness of having turned 60, and of the group aging of his entire little travel family -- after all, by then he had been traveling and working with largely the same production team for decades, and none of them were getting younger. I'm cheered by the thought that still ahead for me is one more Palin journey, New Europe.

Do I have to add that it's unimaginable that American TV would ever undertake anything remotely like these journeys? There is, after all, no obvious commercial payoff to any of them. The BBC, however, has garnered not only strong audience response to these series, but continued income from sales of the books and now the DVDs. It's not the kind of money that would impress a Hollywood mogul. Luckily that's not the standard at the BBC.

Finally, Today The State Department Warned Travelers Away From Egypt

The State Department is very cautious about harming the tourism business of allies and client states and for the entire week-- with dozens killed, including an American student-- the State Department didn't issue a warning about Egypt, despite the turmoil. But tourism is a gigantic part of the economy and warning away tourists is almost like declaring economic warfare. Some say that Morsi fell because Egyptian tourism was down by about 25% this year. But today, the State Department did warn tourists to find another destination instead of Egypt.

Egypt
July 3, 2013

The U.S. Department of State warns U.S. citizens to defer travel to Egypt and U.S. citizens living in Egypt to depart at this time because of the continuing political and social unrest. This Travel Warning supersedes the Travel Warning issued on June 28, 2013.

On July 3, 2013, the Department of State ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government personnel and family members from Egypt due to the ongoing political and social unrest.

Political unrest, which intensified prior to the constitutional referendum in December 2012 and the anniversary in 2013 of Egypt's 25th January Revolution, is likely to worsen in the near future due to unrest focused on the first anniversary of the President’s assumption of office. Demonstrations have, on occasion, degenerated into violent clashes between police and protesters, and between protesters supporting different factions, resulting in deaths, injuries, and extensive property damage. Participants have thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails and security forces have used tear gas and other crowd control measures against demonstrators. There are numerous reports of the use of firearms as well. While violent protests have occurred in major metropolitan areas, including downtown Cairo, Alexandria, and Port Said, the security situation in most tourist centers, including Luxor, Aswan, and Red Sea resorts such as Sharm el Sheikh, continues to be calm. Of specific concern is a rise in gender-based violence in and around protest areas where women have been the specific targets of sexual assault.

On June 28, a U.S. citizen was killed during a demonstration in Alexandria. On May 9, a private U.S. citizen was attacked with a knife outside of the U.S. Embassy after being asked whether he was an American. Additionally, Westerners and U.S. citizens have occasionally been caught in the middle of clashes and demonstrations. U.S. citizens are urged to remain alert to local security developments and to be vigilant regarding their personal security by knowing the locations of police and fire stations, hospitals, and the U.S. Embassy.

If you wish to depart Egypt, you should make plans and depart as soon as possible. The airport is open and commercial flights are still operating, although cancellations may occur. Travelers should check with their airlines prior to their planned travel to verify the flight schedule. There are no plans for charter flights or other U.S. government-sponsored evacuations. U.S. citizens seeking to depart Egypt are responsible for making their own travel arrangements.

The U.S. Department of State strongly urges U.S. citizens to avoid all demonstrations in Egypt, as even peaceful ones can quickly become violent, and a foreigner could become a target of harassment or worse. Because of the proximity of the U.S. Embassy to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the U.S. Embassy has sometimes been closed to the public on short notice due to violent protests. The Embassy will notify U.S. citizens as quickly as possible of any closing and the types of emergency consular services that will be available. Should security forces block off the area around the U.S. Embassy during demonstrations, U.S. citizens should contact the American Citizens Services section before attempting to come to the U.S. Embassy during that time. U.S. citizens are urged to remain alert to local security developments and to carry identification and, if moving about alone, a cell phone or other means of communication that works in Egypt.

Were You Thinking About A Trip To Luxor In Egypt?

Egypt is one of the world's original tourist destinations. People have been traveling there to see the wonders-- whether built by man or alien-- since the beginning of recorded time. Roland and I decided to spend a month there just after Thanksgiving, 1997. Egypt is usually overrun with tourists from around the world. But the month we were there, we basically had Egypt to ourselves (not counting the Egyptians). Luxor (ancient Thebes), with the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens and the Temple of Karnak, were especially empty. That's because just as we were leaving L.A. in November, a bunch of religionist fanatics slaughtered a busload of tourists from Switzerland or Austria and Japan. It was really a spectacular horror show with scimitar-wielding terrorists chasing unarmed tourists through the ruins and mercilessly slashing them to death. It was a bloody slaughter; 5 dozen were murdered. All the tourists left Egypt just as we were arriving. And they stopped coming (at for a couple weeks). I feel terrible for the Austrians and Japanese, of course; I mean what a way to go! But... well, Roland and I pretty much had Egypt to ourselves. I mean it was just us and the Egyptians, who, except for the scimitar-wielders, are an extremely generous, friendly and gracious people.

As for modern Luxor, the prosperity and the economy is almost entirely based on the steady influx of tourists from around the world. So when President Mohammed Morsi appointed a new governor of Luxor who was connected to the scimitar-wielding Gamaa Islamiya terrorists, the people of Luxor freaked out. The Minister of Tourism, Hisham Zaazou, resigned, saying the appointment would have "dire consequences" for tourism in Egypt. The new governor, Adel al-Khayat, is best known in Luxor as a member of Gamaa Islamiya, a group remembered for devastating the city's economy for several years. Demonstrations haven't been as reported on as the ones in Turkey and Brazil, but they were big and they were getting out of hand all last week. Some started calling for Morsi himself to step down.

Yesterday, there was some confusion over whether the new governor would step down or not. Rumors that Morsi had told him to forget the whole deal were denied on Saturday.

Khayyat told Turkish news agency Anadolu that he is not thinking about resigning, although he is currently in his hometown of Suhag, awaiting the outcome of recent events. “There will be no resignation Insha'Allah (God willing),” Khayyat said.

Senior figures from the group’s political arm, the Construction and Development Party, told the London based pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat earlier Saturday that Khayyat had resigned over mass protests demanding his ouster.

“Al-Khayat resigned so that people could realize that we are not interested in the job and are not clinging to it,” Construction and Development Party head Nasr Abdel Salam reportedly said.

...The governor failed to reach his office on Wednesday as angry protesters blocked the road to the governorate building, setting tires on fire. Residents, tourism sector employees, and secularist groups have all joined the demonstration.

Khayyat had postponed starting his work to “ensure everyone's safety,” according to Abdel Salam, and in fear of clashes between his opponents and supporters, after the latter have had to form a human shield around him to protect him.

But today he made it official; he resigned "to prevent bloodshed."

"I discussed with my brothers from the Construction and Development party, and we agreed that I should present my resignation as Luxor's governor because we don't want bloodshed," he said in a statement. "We cannot accept the shedding of even one drop of blood for a position that we never wanted."

El-Khayat was one of the 17 provincial governors appointed last week by Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. His appointment steered anger among tourism workers and activists in Luxor and hundreds of people have protested Morsi's choice outside the governor's office.

El-Khayat's party calls for strict implementation of Islamic Shariah law, which includes imposing an Islamic dress code for women, banning alcohol, and preventing the mixing of the sexes. Workers in a city as heavily dependent on tourism as Luxor worried that such policies would further hurt their business.

Officials of the Construction and Development party said on Sunday that el-Khayat's resignation decision was not made under pressure and that it showed the party's political maturity.

The party has in recent weeks emerged as a strong backer of Morsi against the opposition, which plans massive protests on June 30 to force him out of office. Leaders of the group have declared the protesters non-believers and have vowed to "smash" them on June 30, the first anniversary of Morsi's assumption of office as the nation's first freely elected leader.

UPDATE: I Hope You're Not In Egypt Today... Totally Unsafe

An American student was killed this weekend and millions of Egyptians have taken to the streets to try to oust Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood, who have been overplaying their hand. This isn't just in Cairo's Tahrir Square. This is everywhere.

At least four people have been killed and nearly 200 wounded in clashes between supporters and opponents of Egypt's Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, security and medical sources say.

All four dead were shot in Nile Valley towns south of Cairo, one in Beni Suef and three in Assiut. Across the country, the Health Ministry said, 174 people were given medical treatment as a result of factional fighting in the streets.

In Cairo and Alexandria, more than one million took to the streets on the first anniversary of Mursi's inauguration to demand that he resign.

Waving national flags and chanting "Get out!", a crowd of more than 200,000 had massed by sunset on Cairo's central Tahrir Square in the biggest demonstration since the 2011 uprising that overthrew Mursi's predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.

"The people want the fall of the regime!" they shouted, echoing the Arab Spring rallying cry that brought down Mubarak-- this time yelling it not against an ageing dictator but against the first elected leader in Egypt's 5000 year recorded history.

Many bellowed their anger at Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood, accused of hijacking the revolution and using electoral victories to monopolise power and push through Islamic law.

Others have been alienated by a deepening economic crisis and worsening personal security, aggravated by a political deadlock over which Mursi has presided.

As the working day ended and 38 Celsius heat eased, more protesters converged through the eerily deserted streets of the shuttered city centre, while smaller crowds protested in several other areas of the capital.

The veteran leaders of Egypt's secular, liberal and left-wing opposition, including former chief of the UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei and leftist presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, joined protest marches in Cairo.

A Reuters journalist said hundreds of thousands of anti-government protesters marched through the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, Egypt's second city, and a military source reported protests in at least 20 towns around the country.

The are rumors that Morsi has fled from Cairo-- on the one year anniversary of his election victory. You don't want to be walking around in this:

Why Visit Italy's Tremiti Islands?

Rightists through history-- always looking for easy scapegoats for an unpalatable agenda that can't survive without divisiveness-- have been obsessed with homosexuality. This week we saw Florida's Tea Party junior senator, Marco Rubio, shrilly threatening to scuttle his own immigration bill if it includes protections for LGBT families.

While discussing Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) proposed amendment to the immigration bill-- which would grant same-sex couples the same protections as heterosexual couples by making the law recognize “any marriage entered into full compliance with the laws of the State or foreign country within which such marriage was performed”-- Rubio insisted that he could not abide by such a rule.

Halfway round the world-- and two thousand years ago-- a very uptight Emperor Augustus exiled his granddaughter, Julia the Younger, to Isole Tremiti, a tiny archipelago off the coast of southeastern Italy in he Adriatic Sea. She had committed adultery and she died there. Later, in the early 1900s, when Italy embarked on rebuilding an empire, they used the Tremiti Islands as a prison for dissidents from the conquered province of Libya. When Mussolini took over he decided to use one of the islands, San Domino (the only one with a sandy beach and, today something of a tourist mecca) as an internment camp for gays. As obsessed with homosexuality as Rubio or any other right-wing loon, Mussolini claimed Italy had no homosexuals-- "In Italy there are only real men."

Seventy-five years ago in Fascist Italy, a group of gay men were labeled "degenerate," expelled from their homes and interned on an island. They were held under a prison regime-- but some found life in the country's first openly gay community a liberating experience.

...Back in the late 1930s the archipelago played a part in the effort by Benito Mussolini's Fascists to suppress homosexuality.

Gay men undermined the image that the dictator wanted to project of Italian manhood. "Fascism is a virile regime. So the Italians are strong, masculine, and it's impossible that homosexuality can exist in a Fascist regime," says professor of history at the University of Bergamo, Lorenzo Benadusi.

So the strategy was to cover up the issue as much as possible.

No discriminatory laws were passed. But a climate was created in which open manifestations of homosexuality could be vigorously suppressed.

...The whole episode has been largely forgotten.

It's thought that nobody who endured this punishment is still alive today, and there are few detailed accounts of what went on there.

But in their book, The Island and the City, researchers Gianfranco Goretti and Tommaso Giartosi talk of dozens of men, most but not all from Catania, enduring harsh conditions on San Domino.

They would arrive handcuffed, and then be housed in large, spartan dormitories with no electricity or running water.

"We were curious because they were called 'the girls'," says Carmela Santoro, an islander who was just a child when the gay exiles began to arrive.

"We would go and watch them get off the boat... all dressed up in the summer with white pants-- with hats.

"And we would watch in awe-- 'Look at that one, how she moves!' But we had no contact with them."

Another islander, Attilio Carducci, remembers how a bell would ring out at 8pm every day, when the men were no longer allowed outside.

"They would be locked inside the dormitories, and they were under the supervision of the police," he says.

"My father always spoke well of them. He never had anything bad to say about them-- and he was the local Fascist representative."

...[S]ome of the few accounts given by former exiles make clear that life was not all bad on San Domino.

It seems that the day-to-day prison regime was comparatively relaxed.

Unwittingly, the Fascists had created a corner of Italy where you were expected to be openly gay.

For the first time in their lives, the men were in a place where they could be themselves-- free of the stigma that normally surrounded them in devoutly Catholic 1930s Italy.

What this meant to the exiles was explained in a rare interview with a San Domino veteran, named only as Giuseppe B-- published many years ago in the gay magazine, Babilonia-- who said that in a way the men were better off on the island.

"In those days if you were a femminella [a slang Italian word for a gay man] you couldn't even leave your home, or make yourself noticed-- the police would arrest you," he said of his home town near Naples.

"On the island, on the other hand, we would celebrate our Saint's days or the arrival of someone new... We did theatre, and we could dress as women there and no-one would say anything."

And he said that of course, there was romance, and even fights over lovers.

...It is deeply ironic that in the Italy of that time, they could find a degree of freedom only on a prison island.

The party of gay and lesbian rights activists who gathered on the archipelago the other day put down a plaque in memory of the exiles.

It will be a permanent reminder of Mussolini's persecution of homosexuals.

"This is necessary, because nobody speaks of what happened in those years," said one of the activists, Ivan Scalfarotto, a Member of Parliament.

And the suffering hasn't ended for Italy's gay community, he says. They are no longer shackled and shipped off to islands-- but even now they are not regarded as "class A" citizens.

There is still no real social stigma attached to homophobia in Italy, Scalfarotto says, and the state doesn't extend legal rights of any kind to gay or lesbian couples.

Their struggle for equality goes on.

Today San Domino Island has 607 reviews by Trip Advisor users of two dozen hotels. Over 100,000 vacationers descend on the island each summer. People fly into Bari's airport and either take a boat from Manfredonia, Vieste and Peschici, Vasto, Pescara or-- most popular-- from Termoli on the coast of Molise. The fast boat is 45 minutes and the slow boat in almost 2 hours. Prices range between €13 and €18€. If you're feeling flush you can take a 20 minute helicopter ride from Foggia for €50. You can't bring a car to the Tremiti Islands-- and they're small enough to explore by foot.

Protests In Istanbul: "Those Who Present Themselves As Conservatives Only Care About Profit Maximization"

Once a week I like to hike up to the top of the biggest peak in Griffith Park. It takes 2 hours but when you arrive, you have a 360 degree vista of Los Angeles. Griffith Park is one of the biggest urban parks in America-- 4,310 acres. I sometimes ask Roland if he thinks Angelenos will fight when the big developers finally get politicians corrupt enough to start allowing commercial development in the park. He thinks I'm crazy and that (commercial development) that would never happen.

My first trip to Istanbul was early in 1969. It was a major resting spot on the Hippie Trail to India. Conventional hippie wisdom warned that the Turks are a bunch of a-holes and to get out of Istanbul as fast as possible and just drive through Iran towards Afghanistan as quickly as you can. The hippies all gathered in the Sultan Ahmet district-- and so did the people who wanted to prey on them, the dregs of Turkish society including the police. I was actually in the Pudding Shop when the events that soon turned into Oliver Stone's movie, Midnight Express, happened. The whole Sultan Ahmet area was a den of inequity back then-- crawling with hippies coming and going and with people selling them drugs and people ripping them off and police busting them... I couldn't wait to get away.

So I left the Hippie Trail terminus and drove across town to Taksim Square, the heart of modern Istanbul. I found Gezi Park immediately, a refuge of peace and quiet in the middle of the bustling city. My escape from Sultan Ahmet helped me understand the nature and worthlessness of conventional wisdom. Sure, the lowlife Turks the hippies were encountering were a-holes. But that's like judging all Americans by hanging out in Times Square (or the old Times Square before they made it into Disney Land). In Gezi Park I met normal Turks and had a completely different experience than the Hippie Trail experience of Istanbul was.

Since then, I've been back to Istanbul over a dozen times. Ironically, Sultant Ahmet-- which does have the best tourist attractions-- has been cleaned up and is now home to the best hotel in the country, the 4 Seasons and lots of other high end places to stay. Lately I've gravitated back to that part of town. But for decades I always tried staying close to Taksim and Gezi Park. We had decided to rent a house in Istanbul this summer-- on the Princess Islands-- but it fell though, or else I would be busy trying to get my deposit back now.

You probably heard by now that the government has used excessive police violence-- even tossing tear gas canisters out of helicopters-- against demonstrators in Gezi Park who oppose tearing it down to make room for a shopping mall.

Ayaspasa Environmental and Urban Beautification Association board member Cem Tüzün told reporters that the construction work is illegal. “We have submitted a petition to the Regional Board of Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets. We told them that the construction work currently being conducted is out of line with the construction plans prepared at the beginning and with an ongoing highway project,” he said. He added that they hope the construction work stops at once and that the trees that have been uprooted are replanted.

A senior Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) official stood in front of a bulldozer after bypassing a police barrier and forced the machine to stop, in protest of the demolition of Taksim Gezi Park.

Arriving at the scene of demolition along with other protesters in the afternoon, BDP deputy Sırrı Süreyya Önder told reporters that the project does not reflect the environmentalist spirit of Mehmed the Conqueror, believed to have said he would give orders to kill those who uproot trees, in open criticism of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.

“Those who present themselves as conservatives only care about profit maximization through such projects regardless of concerns over the environment,” Önder said.

The BDP deputy then asked the officials in charge of the demolition of the park to show the legal document permitting the work at the site and stood in front of the construction machine.

The officials halted the demolition as they did not have in their possession any document giving them the go-ahead for the work at Gezi Park.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan may be a "friend" of President Obama's but his conservative, socially backward political party is corrupt and authoritarian at its core. With tens of thousands of protesters demanding his government resign and chanting "united against fascism," brutal police-- mostly from the Anatolian provinces-- brutalized demonstrators. Over 1,000 people were injured on Friday alone. Erdogan, who I'm guessing is making a fortune from the crooks who want to develop Gezi was arrogant about the protesters who want to protect it from the bulldozers. “Every four years we hold elections and this nation makes its choice. Those who have a problem with government’s policies can express their opinions within the framework of law and democracy." He demanded they stop protesting. Instead, protests spread across the whole country.

Yesterday police were using tear gas against protesters in Istanbul and Ankara. Anger against Erdogan's corrupt government has no supplanted the original environmental objectives of the demonstrations.

One Istanbul resident, who gave her name as Lily, told the BBC's World Service: "There are 40,000 people crossing the bridge between Asia and Europe today. All the public transport is on lockdown."

She said that police had dropped tear-gas canisters from helicopters overnight.

"About half past one the entire city started to reverberate. People were banging on pots, pans, blowing whistles," she said.

The BBC's Louise Greenwood in Istanbul says police from as far afield as Antalya are being drafted in to help quell the violence.

She says the central Taksim district and surrounding areas remain cordoned off and bridges are closed to traffic.

"Quell the violence?" Good old BBC. The police are the violence-- especially the ones from the distant (backward) provinces. Turkish spring? The President of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, is worried that the situation is spiralling out of control. There have been rumors that the military could move in if the police violence doesn't stop. And this morning, Erdogan was pressured into withdrawing the police from Taksim Square and allowing the demonstrations to continue unmolested... for now. There are also widespread reports that his government is trying to block social media sites. The corporate media hasn't covered the demonstrations and the only way word is getting out is over the Internet. So Erdogan would like to shut that down as well.

UPDATE: Turkey Isn't Safe For Tourists

As the police of an uptight, authoritarian government brutalize demonstrators in Istanbul, Ankara and other Turkish cities, CNN is warning tourists away. "Ongoing local protests, government retaliation and related unrest in the city have many wondering if they should pull the plug on upcoming trips or make any new plans at all."

According to the 2012 MasterCard Global Destinations Cities Index, Istanbul is among the fastest growing tourism markets in the world, receiving 11.6 million international visitors and earning $10.6 billion in travel revenue in 2012.

The Turkish Statistics Institute reports the country's total tourism revenue for 2012 was $29.4 billion. According to an April report by TradeArabia, Turkey expects to receive 33 million international visitors in 2013.

..."Istanbul, a city that has always been known as Turkey's cultural heart, is turning into a war zone," says Royce Yakuppur, a local who has been to Gezi Park several times in recent days. "Although the feeling of solidarity (among locals) should be applauded as a virtue, it is not enough to overcome the fears of tourists."

Unsurprisingly, local travel agencies report that some travelers have recently canceled trips to Istanbul or are having second thoughts about coming in the next few weeks. Yet "many" are still going ahead with their plans.

Inside the 5-star Divan Hotel in Taksim Square