Touchdown!

Okay, I'm in Israel, and I think I finally figured out how to post to the blog from my phone. Let’s see if it works...

I was supposed to catch El Al flight 012 from JFK at 1:20 AM Thursday morning. Every air traveler hopes for minimal or no delays, but that was apparently not meant to be: air travel technology has become so sophisticated that my flight was delayed an hour-and-a-half already a full day in advance. (Give airlines enough time, and they'll figure out how to already delay your flight by a week even before they schedule an original departure time for it.)

Still, one thing I gotta admit is that air travel is not so bad these days - provided, of course, that you are some alien being that is only 17 inches tall and has a digestive system capable of tackling the steel-and-cardboard "meals" they serve you. For actual humans, though - especially tall people like me - you feel like the seats were imported from S'dom, and you half-expect the flight attendants to come around with hacksaws to trim your feet down to size. The meals, too, wouldn't have been so bad if their primary intended usage had been as paperweights.

But getting back to my actual flight, I was assigned seat 54H - that's an aisle seat in the right-most section of the plane, four rows from the back. I squeezed myself in - probably shattering both kneecaps in the process - and waited apprehensively to see who would have the center seat, praying hard that it would NOT be another person my size. You can imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when my seatmate turned out to be not only a normal-sized person, but even someone I knew: the son of the director of the camp where I worked this past summer. Hashem was looking out for me even better than I could have imagined, though: five minutes into the flight, my seatmate announced that he had a friend on board elsewhere on the plane who had an empty seat next to him, and thus he was going to sit with his friend, leaving the seat next to me empty. Thus, I was able to stretch my legs considerably for the remainder of the journey, making the so-called "economy class" bearable.

The rest of the journey passed by somewhat uneventfully, Baruch Hashem. We landed - judging by the amount of taxiing the plane had to do after the landing - about 79 miles away from Ben-Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv, pretty much on schedule. Passport control, baggage claim, and customs went off Baruch Hashem without a hitch, and now it was time to figure out how to make it all the way to my dira in one piece - well, technically, one piece plus three pieces of luggage plus one piece of hand luggage plus one hatbox, for a total of six pieces. But you get my point...

I ended up taking a "tender", which is a van of sorts that carries 10 passengers and their baggage. The trip to Yerushalayim took about 40 minutes, and I learned lots of new useful Hebrew words, thanks to the driver's constant cursing. I was dropped off in front of a bakery about a block away from my dira, to the tune of 50 shekels (hereafter known as "sheks", since that what everyone calls them). Just when I was beginning to worry how I was gonna get all my stuff over to my dira, hashgacha pratis struck again: an old friend of mine from Vyelipol just "happened" to be using the payphone outside the bakery. He helped me find the dira, and helped carry my luggage there.

So Baruch Hashem, nearly 24 hours after leaving my house, my journey came to a happy conclusion in Yerushalayim Ihr Hakodesh, the holiest city in the world. Yup, definitely worth the trip...