Between jet lag, Shabbat, and an uncooperative hotel internet connection (need to sit by a certain pole in the lobby to get a good enough signal to do anything - no joke), I'm running way behind on my posts. Bear with me!
October 30/31 2013
Officially the tour “started” on October 30, but since the
flight wasn’t scheduled to leave till 7:00 p.m. from JFK in reality the tour
didn’t begin until we disembarked at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.
Not that our adventure had to wait till October 31.
We left MD at 5:30 a.m. and headed towards New York – the
goal: to arrive in Brooklyn by about 10:00ish to meet Robin and the babies.
Hang out and have lunch with them before continuing on to the airport.
Twins-time is always awesome!
On the plane, Andy had his window seat and I had my aisle
seat. And since the seats were 3 across, that meant there was somebody in the
middle seat. And his name was Allen. From Whitestone, Queens. Which was fairly
obvious, since his Queens accent was thick enough to cut with a hatchet. So
thick, that when he asked for “Wawdah” (water), the flight attendants kept
saying, “Mah zeh?” (“what is this?”).
Each seat had its own “entertainment center” built into the
back of the seat in front of you. The ones in our row didn’t seem to work too
well. Allen’s didn’t work at all.
The flight attendants, a little busy with food distribution, heard and
understood the problem and promised to reboot his system and see if that would
help. Three reboots later, and it was obvious the unit was non-functional.
So they offered to move him to a different seat. Problem
was, the only seats available were other middle seats. But Allen kept asking,
“How are you going to compensate me for this? 1st class? Aisle seat?
Window seat?” and the flight attendants (multiple flight attendants) would keep
replying, “I’m sorry but all I can do is forward this problem to my manager and
offer to change your seat.”
Sympathy for the guy kinda ran out around the 5th
or 6th go-round of this skit.
Though for several seconds there it seemed that he was
seriously thinking about moving which would have given us EXTRA SPACE. Please
please please take their offer to move!
Nope. He stayed.
Plus, he sat in his seat in typical New York “subway stance”
– his legs taking up way more room than they were entitled to (I lost nearly
1/3 of the space to put my feet), and listing to one side when he fell asleep.
VERY disappointed that he didn’t take them up on the offer
to move.
Let’s not leave out the guy in the seat in front of me who
almost immediately slammed his seat alllllll the way back, so that it was about
3 inches from my face. I did ask him to move it up just a bit. Which he did
(enthusiasm underwhelming).
I managed to pull off about 4 hours of sleep (a record) – in
bits and pieces, but still, pretty good. And when I woke up for breakfast,
there was the seat, 3 inches from my face. As breakfast was served, it took 2
tries and a shoulder tap to get him to move his seat forward.
But really, the best part? A woman who couldn’t wait for the
food cart to move past her seat to allow her to move forward climbed up and
surfed the armrests! I got a real good view of her stocking-ed feet. That was a
first.
After we landed, we met up with our tour group, picked up
our luggage and trudged through passport control. I think we went through
Customs, but I don’t remember filling out any paperwork or seeing a Customs
official. On the other hand 4 hours of sleep isn’t enough to keep all the brain
cells firing.
We met our tour guides – Micki and Raffi and climbed into
the van that will be our base of operations for the next 10 days.
We had 2 stops before Jerusalem. The first was the Amored
Services museum and memorial at LaTrun, dedicated to all the Israeli soldiers
who gave their lives in defense of their families and homes. Our tour guide was Gali, a (very) young
soldier. More interesting and moving than expected, the displays included tanks
(including one of WWII vintage sold to Israel by France which had turned out to
be owned by the Nazis at some point), and the Wall of Names listing the name of
every lost soldier for all of Israel’s wars.
 |
| Gali (our soldier guide) and a Nazi/French/Israeli tank. |
The second stop was a breathtaking overlook with a
spectacular view of all of Jerusalem. Raffi told us about Jerusalem’s history –
how it pre-dates King David, who’s original capital of the tribe of Judah was
Hebron, and Jerusalem was the capital of the tribe of Benjamin (Kingdom of
Israel). Once the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Persians, David took
Jerusalem to be the capital of the kingdom of Judah.
Now it was close to 5:00 p.m. and the sun was going down –
we wondered why sundown was so early? Turned out Israel had switched to
Daylight Standard Time last week, instead of this week for the U.S.
We were all running out of whatever steam we had left. It
was wonderful to finally arrive at the hotel on King George St.
After chilling out in the lobby for a bit to access the wifi
for free, we decided to just go for a walk in an attempt to stay awake just a
bit longer. We walked down King George Street to Ben Yehudah Street – still up
and running even on a work night. Awesome shopping street – we’ll have to go
back and take a closer look.
We had delicious felafel and shawarma, followed by ice cream
as we made our way back to the hotel.
I’ve managed to find a second wind long enough to write
this.
Tomorrow: Yad VaShem.
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