Foreign Tourists

Sage advice to U.S. tourists in 1995:Travel to an economically troubled country where the beleaguered dollar will buy more. Despite the much-heralded plummet of the U.S. greenback, some other countries are actually in much worse shape.Mexico and Canada, their economic policies in shambles, look ++ like the best prospects for U.S. travelers as the peso and Canadian dollar continue to struggle.Turkey and Ecuador are true bargains among less-frequented destinations. Meanwhile, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece also will be kinder to your wallet because of decent exchange rates, according to travel and foreign exchange experts.

Q: I intend to visit South Korea, particularly Seoul. Am I likely to find bed and breakfast accommodations there?A: The equivalent of bed and breakfast in South Korea is theminbak, a system under which families make one or more rooms in their homes available to paying guests.Traditionally minbak, found only in the countryside, have been used only by Koreans, and typically breakfast is not included.But under a program set up by the Korea National Tourism Corporation, hundreds of families who live in cities and who have a working knowledge of English have been recruited to offer a room and breakfast to foreign tourists.

The West Coast turns out to be as fatal to foreign tourists as the East and Gulf Coasts.Tornadoes were sent to mop up any part of the Southeast that missed the ice storms last month.The trouble with strong-man government, as in Mexico, is that the lone assassin is the strongest man.Don't look now, but two nuclear powers, Russia and Ukraine, are heading to war over Crimea, over which wars have been fought before . . .Bill faces only two obstacles to his foreign policy: the Republicans and the Democrats.

The release of John Demjanjuk by Israel and his readmission to the United States may represent the considered judgment of two great legal systems after years of deliberation.But it puts a strain on the civil society of Greater Cleveland, which that region will have trouble containing and which it did nothing to deserve.Probably most of the Jews of Greater Cleveland, living in suburbs east of the city, believe that Mr. Demjanjuk must be guilty of crimes against humanity, the identity of the camp in which he committed them not mattering, and of having entered this country illegally in the first place by concealing the facts.

After a German tourist was murdered in Miami and before a British tourist was murdered near Tallahassee, the Miami Herald editorialized, "Fighting crime against visitors is only a partial answer to the problem . . . . We must also stop the daily savagery against each other." A Herald columnist wrote, "We should be less concerned about how others view us and more concerned about how we view ourselves." Sure, but precisely because the victims were visitors, no recent crime story has so highlighted the direct link between crime and a community's overall well being.

After the Baltimore Museum of Art and Walters Art Gallery introduced admission fees a few years back, could Buckingham Palace be far behind?It took the convergence of fire at Windsor Castle, the soaring unpopularity of the royal family and the embarrassment of the exchequer faced with the Windsor repair bill to bring Queen Elizabeth II into trade like some common aristocrat.She will open her London home, Buckingham Palace, which belongs to the Crown and not to her personally, to tourists in July and August.

CAIRO, Egypt -- The tourist industry, a bulwark of th Egyptian economy, is in danger of collapse after a series of attacks by Islamic militants against foreign tourists, including one in November that killed a Briton.The decline is being compared to that during the Persian Gulf War when Europeans and Americans virtually stopped traveling to the Middle East.If tourism does not recover soon, the hold of President Hosni Mubarak's administration will be further eroded. Already it is struggling to cope with rising unemployment, a severe housing shortage and a huge public sector that has become a drain on the budget.

HONOLULU -- The foreigners joke. They laugh. They take pictures of companions making funny faces. They use washrooms as bathing areas. They stamp out cigarettes on burial markers. They picnic on the graves.This is the spectacle most mornings at one of America's most solemn sites: the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, burial grounds for thousands of U.S. casualties from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.At sunrise Saturday, President Bush and 5,000 survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor will gather at the cemetery -- often called Punchbowl for the extinct volcanic crater in which it sits -- for a 50th-anniversary memorial ceremony.

Duty Free International Inc.This Connecticut-based operator of duty-free shops reported record third-quarter earnings and said its net income rose 76 percent from the third quarter of last year.Duty Free International has a bonded warehouse in Glen Burnie that allows the company to serve other duty-free retailers. That warehouse is part of the company's Glen Burnie-based diplomatic and wholesale division. Company spokeswoman Dyan C. Cutro said the company bought that division in 1983.Ms. Cutro said the company has done better than other retailers in fighting the recession because its duty-free shops can offer exceptional values to foreign tourists.

When a University of Maryland delegation reached Vladivostok airport recently, it was met by a band of Gypsies.The delegation's Aeroflot flight had arrived early and the Soviet hosts had not yet turned up. In their place were perhaps 75 Gypsies who had been waiting on the airport's second-floor mezzanine, apparently for several days. They had strung makeshift tents from old sheets and blankets, and some sat on the floor in front of these temporary homes drinking tea and smoking. The Soviet hosts hustled their American colleagues out of the airport in a hurry, explaining later in the taxis that they feared something might be stolen.