RANSVESTIA

That night, lying in bed, I mulled this over and it came to me that the preconceived ideas that I'd come to Russia with, could, if I hung on to them, blind me from seeing the country as it really was. I decided that I could continue the trip, diligently searching for verification and vindication of what American propaganda had told me about the country or I could empty my head of all the pre-fabrica- ted and usually false information and just open my eyes and record what I saw, not what I was supposed to expect. I did that and learned a great deal that lots of the others on the trip never saw because they already "knew" about a whole lot of things from their pre-trip indoctrination of one sort or another. As a result I walked off on my own in every city we visited without being followed and I know I wasn't followed because I went places like the Moscow subway where it would have been physically impossible to be followed. I talked to people when they could speak English and they talked freely and easily and not as though they expected to be questioned afterward by the KGB, as we were often told. On several occasions the first questions came from them when they recognized me as being an American. Everywhere people seemed to be adequately clothed, fed, entertained and happy. The world would be so much happier and a heck of a lot safer if both the Soviet and American people could stop being suspicious of each other's motives and see each other just as interesting people, speaking a different language and having different social customs. Think what strides both countries could make if they didn't have to dedicate so much of their national efforts and finances to military matters.

Well, my roommate and I "did" Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev by ourselves and then caught the Aeroflot plane for Yerevan. There, we joined up with the tour group which had spent the previous week touring Turkey which I had done in 1973 and didn't want to repeat. That was why we did the European Russian cities by ourselves. But now with the tour, we went through the transcaucasian countries and down into Iran. I am glad now that I had a chance to see Iran and Afghanistan while they were still "seeable." But after a couple of days in Teheran, we caught a plane for Abadan and from there to Kuwait. Two interesting things happened in Kuwait. The first one was that I was proposed to by a Kuwaiti sheik. I'm not the worst looking woman in the world but I can't take too much credit for my feminine charms because I think he was very anxious to marry an American woman so that he could get into America. Why he was so interested I don't know, but he laid it on thick about how his uncle was the oil

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