Eat Like a Local: Melbourne

Airplane Easy Listening: United, Delta, and Continental hope to install iPod seat connections in their planes by mid-2007, so passengers can watch their own movies, listen to tunes, and charge their devices for free. Dooley Vacations, a tour operator specializing in Ireland B&B packages, is now offering complimentary GPS systems in all its cars. A three-night package with airfare and rental car starts at $549 per person (dooleyvacations.com) Travelers who rent a compact through intermediate class vehicle at participating Hertz locations in 45 European countries will receive a one car-class upgrade. Make an online advance reservation using promotion code #989063 and print out the coupon to present at pick-up; offer good through Mar. 31, 2007 (hertz.com) At the end of 2007, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York's Chinatown will expand into new digs designed by Maya Lin (moca-nyc.org) EasyHotel plans to open an outpost in Budapest this spring (easyhotel.com, from $38) Have you voted yet? Polls close July 6 in a public election to name the new Seven Wonders of the World. Among the nominees: Machu Picchu, the Sydney Opera House, and the Statue of Liberty (new7wonders.com) This month, Bob Marley's heirs will open the Marley Resort & Spa on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. But with rates starting at $495, most fans will be content to visit the gift shop (marleyresort.com) For $140 per day, you can now zip around Copenhagen in a stylish Mini Cooper, complete with racing stripes and an iPod dock (rentamini.com) More than 40 paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe will be on display February 10-May 6 at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. The exhibit will then travel to Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, becoming part of its Year of O'Keeffe celebration (norton.org, $12) The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working on a plan to make Midway--remote islands in the South Pacific--accessible to visitors as early as this summer. To date, details haven't been released on how to book such a trip. Stay tuned (fws.gov/midway) The Seattle Art Museum opened its waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park last month. The nine-acre landscaped property includes works by Alexander Calder and Richard Serra, as well as views of Puget Sound (seattleartmuseum.org). Indianapolis's airport plans on hosting a valet service that'll allow flyers to drop off cars curbside and, after a cell-phone call, pick them up at trip's end without waiting. American Airlines has installed more than 300 passport-reading self-serve kiosks at Miami, Chicago-O'Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, and several other major airports, making it possible for passengers to check themselves in for international flights. During test runs at several Alamo Rent A Car locations, self-serve kiosks proved to cut wait times in half; the agency hopes to install 80 of the stations around the country by summer. On international flights, Delta has reintroduced perks that were previously cut--mid-flight snacks, one free alcoholic beverage--while Northwest has added a new on-demand entertainment system. A new series of pocket-size TimeOut Shortlist guides covers Prague, Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona, and New York City; they cost $12 apiece A spa chain called XpresSpa, which offers massages and other treatments at airports in Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York City (JFK), and Pittsburgh, plans to open in eight more U.S. airport locations by the end of 2007.

On my first morning in Dubai, I sat beside a stone fireplace, sipping hot chocolate and watching a video loop of a roaring fire. The fireplace was inside the St. Moritz, a re-creation of an alpine ski lodge, which is located beside a ski slope, which is located inside the Mall of the Emirates, one of the biggest malls in the world. At lunch, I sat on the sandstone terrace of an Italian restaurant, Toscana, which was also located inside a mall, the Madinat Jumeirah, a re-creation of an Arab souk. I'd moved from hot chocolate to Amarone della Valpolicella, from ski boots to flip-flops. I ordered wild-mushroom risotto and watched water taxis ferry passengers along the narrow waterway between Tommy Bahama, Caviar Classic, and Cinnabon. That evening, I sat on a bench in Heritage Village, which is not a mall but a re-creation of a traditional village in the United Arab Emirates. I watched a man in a flowing white head scarf and a woman in an abaya as they sat on a blanket in a very finite, very imported piece of desert--more like a large sandbox--pouring coffee from a samovar-like pot. I assumed they were picnicking until they offered me a cup, and I realized this was just one more Heritage Village demonstration. "Traditional Arabic coffee," the man said proudly. Lying in bed that night, I wondered if I had been drafted into an elaborate game of make-believe. In order to grow a city from a fishing village to a convenient place to refuel a plane to the world's fastest-growing tourist destination--it now draws more than six million visitors a year--the architects of the new Dubai had to rely more than usual on the power of fantasy. At some point in the early 1990s, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum determined that tourism was to be the cornerstone of Dubai's economy. He knew that one day the emirate's modest oil reserve was going to run dry. But Dubai didn't have the World Heritage sites, cultural attractions, or natural wonders to lure tourists. (There's an undeniable, austere beauty to the desert dunes, but that was hardly enough to build a good case for visiting, especially with competitors like the Sahara.) And so: What Mother Nature and the forces of history did not bequeath to Dubai, Dubai would have to create for itself. Ever since, Dubai has been growing at a breakneck pace, every new project an attempt to outdo the last one. I imagine the sheikh assembling a sort of tourism think tank. I imagine his advisors sitting around and trying to figure out what tourists want, and coming up with a list: Malls! Waterslides! Spas! Theme parks! Gondolas! Sushi! River cruises like the Bateaux Mouches! Dubai has all of these and more. It wants to entertain you; it wants to be all things to all people. Just as Vegas crams the Eiffel Tower, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Roman Colosseum under one metaphorical roof, Dubai offers curious Westerners world-class chefs, family entertainment, and, for those who are so inclined, a thriving sex-tourism industry. It has also drawn comparison to Ibiza for its throbbing club scene and to Singapore and Hong Kong for its overnight evolution into a modern international trading center. And yet, despite visitors' befuddled attempts to find an analogue for Dubai, it is, at base, an utterly Middle Eastern city, albeit an improbably tolerant one. Dubai gathers together all the lavish sights and sounds and tastes of Arabia and makes them safe and accessible for Westerners--many of whom aren't entirely comfortable traveling just anywhere in the Middle East these days. In Dubai, lovers of the exotic can indulge their Thousand and One Nights fantasies. At the One & Only Royal Mirage Hotel, they can recline on the silk pillows of a daybed and sip a Kir Royale in the Rooftop Bar, or lie naked and nibble fresh dates inside the hotel's spa. They can shop for Moroccan lanterns at Madinat Jumeirah, for sandalwood incense in the Perfume Souk on Sikkat al Khail Street, and for chunky 24-karat-gold Cleopatra chokers in the nearby Gold Souk. They can glide down Dubai Creek on a dhow at sunset, booked with Danat Dubai Cruises, the thick air vibrating with the voices of a dozen muezzins calling worshippers to prayer. There are two ways to experience Dubai: first class and economy. As a first-class traveler, you will be indulged beyond your wildest dreams. At the Six Senses Spa, you can have your face exfoliated with crushed diamonds and emeralds. You can rent an $800 VIP pod at Trilogy nightclub, where you and seven of your closest friends will be suspended above the dance floor and plied with drinks by a gorgeous, impeccably coiffed waitress who knows full well that you laid out some serious cash to feel special. You can stay at the mainsail-shaped Burj Al Arab--dubbed the "world's first seven-star hotel" by a travel writer who had clearly been well cared for--where a white-gloved butler will hang up your clothes and plan your entire itinerary while you soak in an Hermès-scented bubble bath. What about the rest of us? The mere mortals who don't have $2,000 a night to drop on a hotel room? The good news is that some of that opulence is within reach. I spent a blissful two hours being pampered to the point of embarrassment in the Oriental Hammam of the One & Only Royal Mirage Hotel. From the moment I arrived, I was attended to like some sort of empress, too precious and delicate to tie my own robe sash or dry my own dewy skin. I was escorted into the dressing room, helped into a cotton robe, then led into a humid marble chamber that echoed with the soothing sounds of splashing water. I lay on a warm marble slab while a woman named Leila scrubbed me with eucalyptus-scented Moroccan soap. After rinsing me with bowl after bowl of hot water, she led me into a steam room, rinsed me again, exfoliated my dry skin, and then slathered me in ghassoul, a mixture of clay and eucalyptus oil. She then applied a honey mask and a couple of cotton pads to my eyes. I was then led to a massage table scattered with rose petals and massaged for 20 bittersweet final minutes, dulcimers pinging quietly in the background. It was far and away the best $100 that I've ever spent. A few days later, I had afternoon tea in the garishly colorful lobby of the aforementioned $2,000-a-night hotel, the Burj Al Arab. For $40, the Burj used to allow the hoi polloi to enter the hotel and take in its soaring 24-karat-gold-leaf columns and helipad. These days, however, the only way that nonguests can catch a glimpse of its infamous excess is to make reservations for afternoon tea or evening cocktails a week or two ahead of time. Guests at cocktail hour--or Indulgent afternoon tea, which costs $35 more than the Regular afternoon tea--get to sit in the Sky Bar and gaze out at The World, a man-made archipelago laid out like a map of the Earth, or at least the 90 percent of it deemed most desirable. Each island is sold separately, so the developers of The World have quietly eliminated countries that don't have strong marketing potential. Israel is nowhere to be found, and North and South Korea have been reunified. I wish I could say that afternoon tea at the Burj was worth the $61 price tag, but as I sat perched on a fire-engine-red divan eating wafer-thin sandwiches and mediocre scones, listening to florid versions of Sting songs played on a grand piano by a woman in a long satin dress, and watching computerized colored fountains shoot 100 feet into the air, I felt like I'd been had. Sure, the admission price gave me access to the Sky Bar (if only for a five-minute post-tea glimpse), with its eight-foot-high picture windows, and the views of The World and the Gulf of Arabia at sunset were mesmerizing. But as I crept around the corridor of the mezzanine admiring the 22-karat-gold-flecked mosaic floors, I found myself wondering who in the crowd belonged, and who didn't. That guy flipping through a newspaper on the couch next to me? He seemed to belong. The ones taking a video of the escalator? Interlopers, just like me. I was more than happy to go back to my lovely $160-a-night hotel, the Arabian Courtyard, which had no gold leaf, but no tourists ogling the lobby, either; it did have appealing rooms with hardwood floors and richly colored upholstery. Even if I were staying at the Burj, I wouldn't want to spend my entire time in Dubai cocooned in a five-star hotel. After all, luxury in Dubai doesn't feel very different from luxury in Bali or Paris or Cabo San Lucas. Better to get out on the streets of Deira or Bur Dubai, the two neighborhoods that flank Dubai Creek, to experience the rush of a dozen cultures at once. Indian women jostle each other for sidewalk space at the Covered Souk, where bejeweled saris tempt them from the store windows. Men in white dishdashas and checkered head scarves lounge on the banks of Dubai Creek at the end of the day, sandals shed. Emirati teenagers gather at the local sheesha café, Blue Barjeel, the boys in baggy jeans, the girls in tight ones, all sipping Turkish coffee and smoking apple tobacco and flirting. Forget the malls: At the marketplaces along the creek, you'll find rose water from Iran, tea sets from China, and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. But Dubai's heady brew of cultures is best experienced through your taste buds. Within its 22 square miles, I encountered tuna sashimi, enchiladas, tiramisu, tandoori chicken, flan, chili fries, pain au chocolat, and lots and lots of shish kebab and hummus. Much of it was improbably hidden away in hotels, which I typically associate with generic Euro-cuisine. At the Park Hyatt, I approached The Thai Kitchen via lighted walkways graced by palm trees and candlelit staircases. The restaurant studiously emulates the casual openness of a Thai marketplace: In the three open kitchens, sous-chefs steam rice in bamboo baskets and grind herbs and spices into pastes with wooden mortars and pestles. No simple pad thai served here: The menu features odd and intriguing combinations of ingredients, such as spicy pomelo salad: segments of grapefruit-like pomelo and steamed prawns accented by sweet, crunchy shallots and tamarind sauce. At the Hyatt Regency, also in Deira, Shahrzad serves Iranian food in a shamelessly opulent atmosphere of heavy silver cutlery and brocade-upholstered chairs. I ordered only one dish, something called a polo--saffron rice cooked with chicken or lamb and a blend of fragrant, subtly merged spices. But after the waiter discovered that I was new to Iranian cuisine, food and drink began materializing at my table every few minutes as if I were an honored guest: olives and yogurt dip and a basket of delicious warm flatbread; sparkling water and lemons; a woodsy amber tea presented on a gold tray; and finally, for dessert, iced vermicelli flavored with rose water, which tasted like I imagine perfume might taste, only sweeter and less acidic. During the meal, I watched a keyboardist play a sinuous melody over the insistent beat of a dumbek drum, while a singer in a series of ever-slinkier evening gowns crooned what I presumed were Persian standards, moving her nimble pelvis in a manner that challenged all of my preconceptions of Muslim modesty. As exciting as I found the cultural smorgasbord, at a certain point I began craving something indigenous to Dubai. One afternoon, I set off for the Bastakia, Dubai's oldest neighborhood. I started with a cappuccino at Basta Art Café, a lovely old house with a tent-shaded courtyard. Then I wandered the quarter's narrow alleyways, brushing my fingertips across the cool walls of the coral-and-gypsum houses. I wandered a few hundred feet, anyway, until my reverie was foiled by a rudeconfrontation with an asphalt parking lot. I turned around and headed down another alley, but that one, too, ended abruptly, cut short by a boulevard heaving with traffic. Hoping a trip to the sand dunes would provide me with a glimpse of the real Dubai, I signed up for a desert safari with Lama Desert Tours. I piled into a Land Cruiser with a posse of oil com-pany executives, and 60 minutes later we pulled up to the edge of the dunes, which glowed pink in the late-afternoon sun. I had dreamed of something simple: a camel ride at sunset, dinner cooked over a fire and eaten under the stars. But you don't go to Dubai to commune with nature--or to enjoy something simple, for that matter. The safari started with dune bashing, which involves careening along the sides of the 100-foot-high dunes and feels a lot like riding an improvised roller coaster. (Our driver pointed out that there were barf bags in the seat pockets.) An hour or so later, we were deposited at the desert camp, which featured small booths where people in bedouin costumes gave demonstrations of Arabic culture. A man in bedouin costume offered five-minute camel rides, and another taught curious tourists how to smoke a sheesha. One woman painted henna tattoos on the freckled shoulders of Germans and Americans and Brits, while another cooked traditional flatbread over an open fire. Nearby, a man served (yet again) traditional Arabic coffee. I could have been in the Arabian pavilion at a World Expo. We ate at low tables, and after dinner, a creamy-white Russian woman performed a belly dance, pulling shyly eager middle-aged men off their cushions and taunting them with her gyrations before inviting the whole audience to join her. The next day, I gave up my quest for authenticity and decided to go to another mall. On the way, I passed long rows of billboards advertising gated "lifestyle communities" that promised days filled with yachts and tennis and poolside mai tais. The horizon was cluttered with construction cranes as far as the eye could see, like outsized dragonflies hovering between columns of scaffolding. More than 100 major development projects are to be completed within the next three years, each one bigger or wider or more luxurious than the last. The mall I visited, Ibn Battuta, is divided into countries, like Epcot. The Persia section has faux-faience domes and Ibn Battuta, a puffy Ali Baba--like character who entertains children; the China area features pagodas and a massive sculpture of a wooden junk keeling to one side; the Tunisian wing is designed to resemble a 14th-century outdoor market, sky and all. While I was roaming through the Egyptian wing, I came upon a kiddie attraction called the Magic Carpet Ride. A British woman deposited her toddler atop a mechanical Persian rug undulating a few feet off the ground. The little girl, perfectly adorable with her blonde braids and rosy complexion, was dressed in a short velvet coat and an Aladdin--style cap. An Arabic melody began to play, and the attendant turned on a video camera to capture the moment. "You're going to wave at me, Beatrice, right?" her mother asked, in anticipation of her daughter's starring role. Beatrice waved and beamed and wriggled around happily. On the monitor before her, the mother could see Beatrice sitting on the carpet, which appeared to be whizzing through the air, weaving among glass-and-steel towers in a virtual-reality tour of Dubai. People began to gather around to watch lovely little Beatrice and wave at her. Beatrice gamely waved back. More people gathered, until there was a crowd of about 30 pressing in on her, laughing at the spectacle of Beatrice zooming around the city on a carpet. Then Beatrice stopped smiling. Her tiny, perfect features warped and contracted, and she began to cry. "Keep waving, sweetie!" encouraged her mother from the sidelines. "You're all right!" But Beatrice had had it with the waving. She had had it with the music and the vibrating carpet ride and the laughing crowd. She scooted herself toward the edge of the carpet. "Be careful, darling!" her mother yelled. On the screen, we watched Beatrice clamber off the carpet and disappear. And then there was only the magic carpet, zooming emptily through the skyscrapers of Dubai. Lodging Arabian Courtyard Al Fahidi St., Bur Dubai, 011-971/4-351-9111, arabiancourtyard.com; from $95 (high season $215; deals can be found online) Food Toscana Souk Madinat Jumeirah Mall, Al Mina, 011-971/4-366-8888, risotto $13 Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, 011-971/4-301-7438, burj-al-arab.com, Regular afternoon tea $61 Thai Kitchen Park Hyatt Dubai, 011-971/4-602-1234, fish in banana leaf $5 Blue Barjeel Al Ghubaiba Rd., Bur Dubai, 011-971/4-353-2200 Shahrzad Hyatt Regency Dubai, 011-971/4-209-1234, chicken polo $20 Basta Art Café Bastakiya Quarter, Bur Dubai, 011-971/4-353-5071, cappuccino $3 Activities Ski Dubai Mall of the Emirates, Sheikh Zayed Rd., New Dubai, 011-971/4-409-4000, skidxb.com, $38 for two hours' skiing Heritage Village Al Shindagha Rd., 011-971/4-393-7151, dubaitourism.ae Danat Dubai Cruises Bur Dubai, opp. British Embassy, 011-971/4-351-1117, danatdubaicruises.com, $18 Oriental Hammam One & Only Royal Mirage Hotel, Al Sufuoh Rd., Jumeirah, 011-971/4-399-9999, oneandonlyresorts.com Lama Desert Tours Al Sayegh Building, Oud Mehta Rd., 011-971/4-334-4330, lamadubai.com, $67 Ibn Battuta Mall Sheikh Zayed Rd., New Dubai, 011-971/4-362-1900, ibnbattutamall.com

Though it sounds like a luxury high-rise or an exhibit at a grammar-school science fair, a Skyspace is essentially just an austere room painted in a neutral color, with a built-in bench around the perimeter and, more to the point, a large hole in the ceiling. The hole opens directly to the sky, and the room is positioned in such a way that celestial and meteorological events are crisply framed by the beveled opening. You sit down and look up, and the sky seems to descend to where you can almost touch it. The experience is reminiscent of the final scenes in the movie Contact--only better, because it's real. The man behind the Skyspaces is James Turrell, a 63-year-old, cowboy-hatted, Santa Claus-bearded rancher/pilot/artist. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Turrell says his first memory is of lying in a crib and watching light play on the ceiling. As a toddler, he devised a way to manipulate the blackout curtains (still around in Pasadena during the last days of World War II) so that he could see stars in the daytime. Turrell was often left in the care of his grandmother, who introduced him to Quaker teachings, urging him to "go inside and greet the light." At 16, he learned to fly, and then he studied mathematics and psychology as an undergraduate at Pomona College, east of L.A. On a neighboring campus, he earned a master's degree in art at the Claremont Graduate School. At the age of 23, the young artist produced his first works from pure, high-intensity, electric light. "I come out of a painting space," Turrell said over a cup of coffee in August. "I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I'd prepare the walls--by sanding, etcetera--the way you'd prepare a canvas for painting." The works were shown publicly at the old Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. Nearly everybody liked them, but hardly anyone understood them. At the time, southern California was putting its art scene on the contemporary map with what was called the Light and Space movement, which ranged from Larry Bell's glass cubes and John McCracken's glossy leaning planks to the mini-environments of Robert Irwin, which were activated by lighting a wall-mounted translucent plastic disk from four different angles at the same time. Even in this visionary context, Turrell was considered pretty out-there. And he saw opportunities for art everywhere. One night, a local vagrant broke into his studio in Santa Monica. ("It's now a Starbucks," Turrell says. "Could happen to anybody.") The man fell, suffered a concussion, and awoke inside a pure white space Turrell had created while the would-be robber was out cold. In the chamber sat a gold harp; Turrell's then-wife played the instrument professionally. When taken into custody by the police, the intruder was relieved to find he hadn't actually died. "The biggest Skyspace, of course, is the crater," Turrell says. For more than 20 years, he has been laboring on a gigantic work of art near Flagstaff, Ariz. In 1974, armed with a Guggenheim artist's fellowship, Turrell spent the better part of a year flying his Helio (a high-wing lightplane) all over the western U.S., searching for what turned out to be an extinct volcano called Roden Crater. When and if the Roden Crater Project is finished, a visitor standing inside the vast, elliptical crater bowl will be treated to a celestial vision with a clarity that's rarely experienced. Most of Turrell's 1984 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant was poured into the project; other funding has come from the Lannan and Dia foundations, and the Skystone Foundation, which administers the project. Turrell has remarked that with the Roden Crater, he's moved "this cultural artifice we call art" out into the rawest kind of nature. With his Skyspaces, he's taken a great and wondrous piece of nature--the sky--and brought it inside. All those of us in the audience have to do is be willing to greet the light. Light houses There are currently 36 Skyspaces in the world. Nine of the 20 in the U.S. are open to the public. The Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe will reopen its Skyspace on July 1 (it's closed for renovations). Another will be unveiled at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., in October. Ideally, a Skyspace should be seen during multiple visits, at different times of day, and in different seasons. Dawns and sunsets are dramatic, with the aperture waxing from indigo to turquoise, or waning from bright blue to orange to black. Note: In some cases, although the museum charges for admission, visiting just the Skyspace is free. Chicago UIC Skyspace, University of Illinois at Chicago, South Campus, 312/996-5611, uic.edu, free Dallas Tending, (Blue), Nasher Sculpture Center, 214/242-5100, nashersculpturecenter.org, $10 Houston One Accord, 1995--1999, Live Oak Friends Meeting House, 713/862-6685, friendshouston.org, free, open Fridays at dusk Minneapolis Sky Pesher, Walker Art Center, 612/375-7600, walkerart.org, museum $8, Skyspace free Nashville Blue Pesher, Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art, 615/356-8000, cheekwood.org, $10 New York Meeting, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, 718/784-2084, ps1.org, $5, open at dusk, call for schedule San Francisco Three Gems, De Young Museum, 415/863-3330, thinker.org/deyoung, museum $10, Skyspace free Scottsdale Knight Rise, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 480/994-2787, smoca.org, museum $7, Skyspace free Seattle Light Reign, Henry Art Gallery, 206/543-2280, henryart.org, $10

In the harsh light and dry wind of an August afternoon, I stepped ahead of my wife and children, crossing a field of pine needles to two cylinders of bronze rising 26 feet high. A taxi driver had brought us to this place, atop a ridge in the Judean Hills, along a twisting back road long ago supplanted by the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. He had told me there was a monument here called Megillat Ha'esh, the Scroll of Fire, and it was a place few Israelis, much less tourists, had ever seen. Indeed, we had the site to ourselves, and the ground, undisturbed by rain for months, did not reveal any other footprints. As I drew closer to the sculpture, I saw why its creator, Natan Rapoport, had chosen the name. The two columns represented the scrolls of Judaism's sacred texts, not only the Torah but also the saga of Esther, read on the holiday at Purim, and of Ruth, read on Shavuot. Instead of words, these metal scrolls bore bas-relief images that depicted Jewish history from biblical times through exile, shtetls, death camps, resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, and finally the creation of modern-day Zion in the 1948 war. The hillsides below were covered with millions of trees, many of them paid for with American donations to the Jewish National Fund. I vaguely remembered having received certificates for one or two trees as presents when I had my bar mitzvah. Even then, barely a year after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, I somehow resisted the place, not because I opposed it, but because loyalty felt to me like an expectation, a requirement. When friends made the obligatory summer trip to Israel after high school, they returned with tales of crowds shoving their way onto buses and brash paratroopers seducing the sexiest American girls. "It's like a whole country of Sicilians," one friend explained to me, "except they're all Jews." For much of my life, I hadn't thought Israel had much to do with me. So I chose other destinations--Greece, Spain, and England with my parents; Bali and Hong Kong for my honeymoon; Ghana, China, South Africa, and the Dominican Republic for journalistic assignments; New Zealand, Japan, and Egypt on my own. By the time I had entered my forties and begun to feel a curiosity (and tribal guilt) about never having gone to Israel, I didn't know how to undo the pattern. In researching a book about the conflicts within American Jewry, though, it became apparent that I would need to conduct a number of interviews with Israelis. And so, in the spring of 1999, I made my first visit. I can still remember sitting in a jitney, sweaty and jet-lagged and cramped, as the road from the airport began climbing the limestone slopes heading east toward Jerusalem, and realizing these must be the Judean Hills, both an ancient artifact and a present reality. When I mentioned that moment to Yossi Klein Halevi, an American-born Israeli journalist whom I interviewed on the trip, he said, "When you get to Israel, you figure out pretty quickly if it's a love affair or not." Yossi didn't mean an uncritical infatuation, which was exactly what I had refused for such a long time. He meant love with all its complexities, heartbreaks, and endurance. On that first trip, during the optimistic heyday of the Oslo Accords, I went with a mixed-gender congregation to the Western Wall on Shavuot and found our group bombarded with insults and plastic bottles by some ultra-Orthodox fanatics. A moment like that will disabuse you of romantic illusions mighty fast. But the cool winds of a Jerusalem dusk, the afternoon light on the limestone buildings, the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, the breakfasts of feta cheese, olives, hummus, and the English-language edition of Haaretz--it all left me impatient to return. I felt that I had discovered a living country rather than a museum paying reflexive homage. And when I came back the next two times, in June 2001 and May 2002, I found a country living in defiance of death as the possibilities of Oslo collapsed into the terrorism of the second intifada. I was at Newark airport awaiting my flight to Tel Aviv when I saw CNN's coverage of the suicide bombing at the Dolphin nightclub. A cabbie in Jerusalem, driving me from the Old City to the Mahane Yehuda market, remarked aridly, "I have the honor of driving the only tourist in all Israel." Absent tourists, Israel showed its resiliency all the more clearly, in the brave way people flocked to an outdoor book fair or the way the TV skits of comedian Erez Tal made satire out of omnipresent danger. Still, I did not feel confident bringing my wife and children during those times. I had promised Aaron we would make a family trip as my bar mitzvah present to him; fortunately, by the time he celebrated that ritual in March 2005, enough calm had returned to Israel for me to make good on the promise. In my solo trips, I had never visited the major museums or archaeological sites, except for the Wall and the Old City, because I knew I wanted to encounter them with my family. We packed all that we could into our 10 days during August 2005: the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem and the Shrine of the Book with the Dead Sea Scrolls; the fortress of Masada and the Roman ruins of Caesarea; the artists market of Nahalat Binyamin in Tel Aviv; and the collection of scale models at the Mini Israel park. I hoped for more than the diversion and entertainment of an ordinary family vacation. I hoped to give my children the sense that Israel had something to do with them. Maybe that epiphany came for Aaron when he found a shard of pottery in the dusty soil of Caesarea, and maybe it came for my daughter when she selected the purple silk prayer shawl she would wear for her bat mitzvah. Sarah marked that rite of passage in November 2006. And it turns out to have been fortunate that we bought her tallith so far ahead of time. We had planned to visit Israel last summer, for a more in-depth tour of Haifa and the north. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah put an end to those plans. But we are already making our reservations for this summer. And when we travel through the Galilee, my daughter will get to see one of her bat mitzvah presents, a donation from Yossi's family to the Jewish National Fund, which is devoted to replant-ing the forests scorched by Hezbollah's rockets. Whatever is green and growing, she will be able to consider some small bit of it hers.