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minister, etc., etc. He begged me to come with him in his car and let him show me his home and the city. Was he kidding? No he wasn't but there was no way I was going to go outside the door of the Kuwait Hilton with any Arab by myself. I might never have come back. Still it was kind of a kick getting proposed to. I told him that I already had a husband in America and that I didn't think he would appreciate it very much if I came back with an Arabian for a souvenir.

The other interesting thing happened without my knowing about it at first. One day we took a small Arabian boat called a Dhow across part of the Persian gulf to see an island with some archaeological ruins built by Alexander the Great. On the way over and back I had had an interesting discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian question with the guides. It wasn't an argument at all, just an exchange of views and some questions asked. No problem as far as I was concern- ed but apparently he was a police informer and he high tailed it to the Kuwaiti police to report on this American woman. I just went back to the hotel. The next morning at the airport our tour leader looked kind of beat and I commented humorously as to whether he had missed most of his sleep the night before. He replied that he had missed a lot of it and all on account of me. Since I'd been asleep all night, I didn't understand. He explained that he had spent several hours with the Kuwaiti police and the Tourist agency trying to get me out of trouble—all on account of my conversation of the day before. It seemed that the Kuwaitis were so up tight about the whole question that they won't even print the word Israeli in their newspapers. Anyway, he was successful but later in the plane, looking at the flight maps, I noted that Kuwait was within about 12 degrees of being exactly half way around the world. I thought back to my friend in Princeton and his prediction. I don't believe in such things but it was an interesting coincidence. But in any case, the prediction didn't stick and I went on through Southern Iran over to Afghanistan, back into the Soviet Union at Tashkent, then to Samarkand, Bukhara, Alma Ata, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk with a side trip into Outer Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.

My roommate and I had been at some odds ever since the second day in Leningrad. I never did quite find out what bugged her but she got annoyed at all the questions I asked the Intourist guide. We had some days of relative friendliness and others when she wouldn't say good morning or good night and nothing in between. In Afghanistan

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