Israel Day 1

Traveling to Israel has made for a very long day or two. To be honest, I'm not even sure how long it's been since I left the Lexington. I think it's only been about 24 hours, but it sure seems like it was quite a bit longer than that.

Our flight out of Lexington left nearly an hour late because the plane didn't even arrive to our gate until the time we were supposed to be departing. We made it to Atlanta with enough time to spare that we were able to get some food. It turns out that we had a lot more time than we expected because after the plane pulled up to a different gate, it had to be moved to our gate, then re-cleaned, catered, and have a security sweep performed. This means we left Atlanta almost an hour and a half later than we were scheduled. How frustrating!

The flight was far less painful than I expected, but it was still 12 hours. Unfortunately, it seemed much longer. This is partly because the little personal video player for each seat had a map that showed us information like flight speed, altitude, tailwind, location, and estimated time of arrival. Unfortunately, it showed that we were about to arrive a good 4 hours before we made it to Tel Aviv. At least I could see on the map that we still had quite a ways to go. It still was depressing though.

Thankfully, I managed to sleep some thanks to Tylenol PM. It's wonderful stuff. Unfortunately, it didn't help me to sleep through breakfast which consisted of a banana (yuck!), a small granola bar (yum!) and a cucumber and hard boiled egg mini sandwich (much worse than it sounds). Let's just say I was thankful to get real food at JUC tonight.

Immigration and Customs at Tel Aviv was painless for all but one of us. One student, who's father is Syrian, was pulled into a room and questioned for a few minutes. But he was back with the group pretty quickly. Then Dr. Stone found us some sheruts (taxi vans) to get us to Jerusalem. That was fun!

Along the way, we got caught in traffic on a highway. One car zoomed up beside us and 3 men in jeans and t-shirts jumped out, ran to the car in front of theirs, threw open the doors, and dragged at least one man out. Turns out they were undercover police officers arresting someone. We thought it might be a Chinese fire drill until we saw that they all had pistols in their waistbands.

To follow that excitement, when we got near our destination, we found the road closed off and were told we would have to hike the rest of the way to JUC with our luggage. Our driver and Dr. Stone chatted with some police officers and managed to get us a bit closer, but we still had to walk a few hundred yards. It might have been less, but it felt like a mile dragging all the luggage. The reason the road was closed off is that there is a lights festival going on at the old city so the walls were lit up with all kinds of pretty colors and there was even a show going on. A group of us are planning to go see it tomorrow night since it's ending Wednesday night.

At the school, we all were shown to our rooms, and grabbed some supper. I'm tired so I'm going to bed. It's 11:10 here, but it feels later.