You can pick an orchid in the back yard of the house on bomb-battered Leveriza Street where TIME'S Manila correspondents live, but you have to lug some chlorinated water home if you want to brush your teeth. There are half a dozen bullet holes in the walls, and the staff of five TIME & LiFErs there had to get along without lights at night for quite a stretch.

At the other extreme is TIME'S News Bureau in sultry Washington, air conditioned from the chief's office to the office boys' hideaway.

But TIME'S correspondent in New Delhi watches the thermometer crowd 104 in the shade -- and nothing can be done about it.

In Chungking TIME'S office was nothing but bamboo and mud and contained the biggest cockroaches in town until it burned down. It had a fine bomb shelter and Teddy White was sort of used to it; now he lives in one room at the Press Hostel, where he pays something like 50,000 Chinese dollars a month for room and board. TIME'S office in Moscow is also just one big room -- this one with a balcony on the fourth floor of the rambling old Metropole Hotel (ten minutes from the Foreign Office, five minutes from the Kremlin). In New York, however, among TIME & LIFE'S 14 floors in the 33-story TIME & LIFE Building at Rockefeller Center, our News Bureau sprawls over seven offices 28 floors above the Hudson at the center of everything.

Furthest north TIME office on this side of the world is in Ottawa: Room 45 of the Carleton Chambers, a one-time law office whose former tenant left yards of legal tomes lined up along the walls when TIME moved in.

Furthest south TIME News Bureau is in Buenos Aires, where Bill Mooney works in 46.9 square meters of linoleum-covered space in Edificio Boston on Avenida Presidente Roque Saenz Pena, a bronze, marble-and-mahogany building so fancy even for Latin America that one dazzled United Stateser exclaimed, "Where's the organ?"

And I guess for the best view from any TIME office anywhere you'd have to go to Rio de Janeiro: in their window-gazing moments our correspondentsthere can look across Rio Harbor to Sugar Loaf Mountain. Drawback: to get into the office at night, you'd have to go through a neighboring apartment building, rise in a rickety service elevator, grope your way down some very dark corridors.

TIME'S office in London (by far the largest maintained in Britain by any American publisher) must be a very different place to work these days than it was only a few months ago (maybe you'll remember the cable from Walter Graebner that began: "A buzzbomb just flew past our window, looked in, saw no crowd and proceeded up the street. Cor, if ever a man suffered . . ."). And before that, of course, there was the airblitz ("You're simply not one of the crowd unless a bomb has blown up in your garden," is the way one of our correspondents put it).

There are twelve other TIME News Bureaus I haven't the space to tell you about this week -- offices in Paris and Chicago, Rome and San Antonio, Mexico City and Boston, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit.

And some week soon I hope to be able to tell you that TIME has reopened a Berlin office--last heard from in June 1941 when its chief caught the train for Basel to telephone us the true story of Hitler's break with Stalin from the uncensored side of the Swiss border.

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