Moving:

Short of some sort of catastrophe, I will be moving to Canberra, Australia for a year. I should be leaving here in June or July. Right in the middle of winter down there. Sigh.

I should have a pretty sweet apartment, so, you know, if you want to come visit, it's only a couple of hours from Sydney.

Back home:

I went to London and Ljubljana last week and got back Monday. It was a very good trip. I'm lazy and my keyboard sucks, but here are some brief points:

Highlights:
1. The Daily Show is on CNN in Slovenia. I asked a German guy and a Kiwi how much of it they could understand and the answer was about half. Jokes about Mormons and with punchline Jiffylubistan were no good even to the native English speaker.
2. Old Town, Ljubljana, which was as beautiful as advertised.
3. The Skopfja Loka town museum, in the old castle. Considering how small the town is, the museum was really good. Lots of great local interest and some stuff from farther afield.
4. St Nicholas' Cathedral in Ljubljana. Beautiful pictures that remind you how many Slovenians used to make their living from the sea and how dangerous it was.
5. The outdoor market in Ljubljana. 4 delicious giant (Tarocco) blood oranges for about $0.50 US.
6. Cvicek (pronounced tswee-check-- the second c has a hat over it)- a kind of very inexpensive and very drinkable Slovene wine. Food wine only.

Lowlights:
1. Still no good Hungarian bread. Seriously, anyone who's been to a Budapest grocery store knows what I'm talking about. It's these chewy rolls that melt in your mouth and turn into some sort of goo and are easily the best bread in the world. However, it appears to be totally unavailable outside of Hungary. I've tried Vienna, Romania, Prague, Bratislava, and now Slovenia as well as more conventional places to no avail.
2. The fast food restaurant that served a dish called "Horseburger." And the little sign on the store with a picture of a horse on it. When I got closer I learned that the store was a butcher shop.
3. The fact that no one believed that I was a native English speaker. Seriously, more than once people would assume that I spoke only rudimentary traveller's English. I mean, it's good not to look American overseas, but do I really look that confused all the time?
4. Not getting to do much of the hike in Skopfja Loka because of the ice.

Yet another trip:

I am going to Ljubljana, Slovenia next week for a couple of days, with London enroute (both going and coming). This is an amazing time to go to the former Eastern bloc countries, I think. Not quite as amazing as it would have been 10-15 years ago, maybe, but you still feel a real sense of change in the air.

I was in Budapest and Prague a few months before they joined the EU (and Budapest again after), Slovakia and Romania about 18 months before they are to join, and now will be in Slovenia less than a year before they are to join. The feeling of hope you get from so many of the people there, the belief that joining the west will lead to a better life for them and their children, makes travelling there a really fun experience.

What we did to central Europe after World War II was, while understandable, also a terrible thing. Abandoning the Czechs and Poles with their short-lived independence to another 50 years of being under someone else's government after what the Germans did to them (especially the Czechs, about whom the world didn't even seem to care) was morally wrong, though it probably was necessary. There was a story about an American air base in Romania a while back and a man the journalist interviewed had been there after the war. He talked about the whole village was looking to the west, waiting for the Americans to come, so that they almost didn't notice the Soviet tanks coming from the east. He said that they had been waiting for the Americans for 60 years now.

Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that even in the middle of a war that seems unwinnable but that we must fight (and I don't mean Iraq here), there are things that are better than they were a generation ago and people who are living better lives. Hope is sometimes the hardest resource to come by.

Tom Fox is dead:

They found the body of American hostage Tom Fox in Iraq today. It's not much of a surprise since the video of the three others that were captured with him was released. I don't know how long he had been dead.

Still nothing on Jill Carroll.