This morning I went to see Ctesiphon, Sal Man Pak in Arabic, an ancient Persian arch about 30km east of Baghdad. My taxi driver was Kurdish, and he had no limits to his praise of the Americans. Though his english was not great, it sounded as though he fought with the Kurds in this recent conflict. A few bridges were blown out, but temporary military ones had been put in place; as well, there were lineups at gas stations several kilometres long while trucks and drivers waited for fuel. Ironic that one of the world's most oil-rich nations would have a fuel shortage of monolithic proportions. Tourism is firmly on the map here as well - not from the hundreds and perhaps thousands of westerners here doing their journalistic things, but from legions of tour buses from - Iran. So that answers the question of whether the border is open. Ctesiphon is a monument of ancient Persia, and they come here by the busloads to take in the ruins of their ancestral empire. Some kids were bothering me, but otherwise I was welcome to pay my one dollar admission price and wander around the site. It was crowded in the morning, though I was the only westerner around; however, I was certainly not the first one to visit. After all, what do all those hacks do on the weekend? To Nasiriyah