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.