Hi art, thanks for the shout-out.

Male, in my sixth decade, born in Niagara Escarpment area of Ontario, also live their now in what's called the GTA. daveto .. uninteresting, was originally "dave to"; languages English only, though can read a surprising amount of French and understand a surprising amount of Spanish. Have worked mainly in financial applications software (pensions and mutual funds), still do some of that but now more general marketing strategies and crap (right word, but I mean good crap, it's interesting), among other things, mainly with small to small-mid sized companies. Education (not mine, others) is in the mix too.

Yes I like travelling. I'm happiest that my kids have the travel bug too. They're smart, street-smart, and adventurous, and I take a lot of credit for that. I haven't been to Israel. I honestly have no favourites, I just really like to mingle (they are my peeps more than my neighbours or co-workers, don't know why, and not talking tourists). I've visited around 40 countries (not counting layovers, an old joke), business and pleasure (about half and half), and I can think of one bad experience (torrential rains for 7 out of 7 days .. honed my snooker game). If I say the best is of the most recent, then I would put Nicaragua near the top. The food was pretty terrible. (A trick with travelling, your meals during the day get progressively lighter.) The people are the people. I would say universally, people want a better world for their kids, that's all and it's that simple. People are honest. The guy who said something like, "Walk into a restaurant, pick a random person, give him the keys to your Ferrari and ask him to take care of it for a day, and you'll get it back better than you left it .. versus ask for a volunteer to take care of your Ferrari and all bets are off" got it right. We tend to self-select good and bad. I mean if you think about it, a bad experience travelling say, you'll generally see a mistake that you have made (to put yourself in that situation). But random people, everywhere, are good. Better than me. That's not a contradiction, because wealth (as in western wealth) corrupts. Now there are annoying things too. I hate how people in tropical countries tend to drop trash so casually, everywhere. It's a tiny thing, but there's a message there.