>The Middle East is well...it is what it is. A couple nice cities in a very difficult socio-economic environment with one industry. Depending on how you count it (European or Central Asia), lots of Turkey is actually pretty nice.
Ha! I'd probably add it to the few nice cities, and strike it from the singular industry list. But the rest still applies I suppose...particularly the difficult socio-economic environment.
In some ways I'd say Israel is like a very compressed and magnified U.S., huge military industrial complex, lots of immigrants, racial and ethnic segregation issues, big hi-tech industry, intense religious conservative red neck types...it's just all in an area the size of West Virginia.
Oy, what about Israel ;-)?