I didn't think Istanbul would be dangerous, but I was right near a PKK bombing there once. I was sitting on a railing near the blue mosque, and got knocked off by the shockwave. Couldn't hear properly for about an hour afterwards.

Port-au-Prince Haiti in 1994 during the US "intervention". We were covering a street rally when shots were fired. I crawled under a mini-bus and found a couple of little boys under there too. They chattered to me in Creole as I tried to pull all of us more under cover. We stayed down awhile and then they somehow seemed to know it was safe to go and they ran off. I found my crew and we regrouped. I felt jumpy for the next few days .. kept thinking someone was watching me and would start shooting again.

South Providence. And probably not, no.

I've never been any place dangerous as far as I can tell. I think the closest is Honduras where there had been some criminal activity towards foreigners, but I felt safe there. I think some parts of the cities in the US I've been in are much more dangerous, but I've had people ask me if I felt safe traveling to Honduras when sharing my exploits.

I totally love the way the NPR reporter in Dakar pronounces it. Makes it a place I want to visit.

I guess buying beer at 6 Mile and John R in Detroit when I was 16 years old. Not as dangerous as I'd thought it would be.

Khartoum, Sudan in 2007? I had to get a transit visa through Sudan to go to my job in Ethiopia for $125 USD and thought if I was paying that much money for a transit visa, why not stay for a week or so (tourist visas cost the same amount). This was about the same time period as the teddy bear case row (I didn't know it at the time since my Arabic is a bit poor. Conversational yes, but written I struggle with).

Long story short, because I was a Canadian female traveling solo, I was harassed by police in the city for breaking curfew (no such law exists) and held in jail for a few days. It wasn't exactly my best experience, but according to the American and Canadian embassies that helped me get out of there, I did nothing wrong and people were just being on power trips. But really, it was ok.

Then again, I'm living alone in Vietnam for a year or so conducting research, so the US customs officials always look at every page of my passport. (Studying an infectious disease probably doesn't help...)

Beirut June 1982. Our plane (From Saudia Arabia) was told (forced?) to land so that it wouldn't be shot down or something. I can't remember how long we camped in the airport. I do remember playing impromptu football with soldiers and dropping swedish and arabian coins in the tip-jar in the bathroom (which the bathroom attendant did not like but I didn't have any other money!) I also remember the size of the guns the soldiers had as they went through our luggage, and the machine-gun bullet holes in the walls.

We flew out of there with no further drama many many hours (a day?) later. It was very tense the whole time we were there. There was a collective sigh of relief on the airplane when we took off and had flown across the border, the captain announced when we had left Lebanon airspace.