Good morning! I'm writing this as I watch the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee, the lowest altitude lake in the world (600 feet below sea level)! Here I am in Israel, and it's already been quite an adventure.
On Monday afternoon, Al and I grabbed our (impressively lightly packed!) bags and took the train to JFK. We met up with our group in the terminal and went through checkin, but not without incident. You see, my friends, Al Binder is a SUSPECTED TERRORIST! We think it was a combination of her being from Boston and having a brand new passport (renewed for this trip). Either way, she was profiled and asked a lot of questions about her background and why she was going to Israel. Security in general was understandably very tight for all of us. Thankfully, they decided that Al was not a terrorist and let us go through security.
Once in the terminal, we wandered for a few hours before meeting up with the group at the gate. This is where we first noticed some of the...eccentricities of our group, who Al and I have lovingly nicknamed "The Cream of the Crop." There is a big group of people on our trip who are well meaning, but actually dumb as bricks. To the point where it's both painful and entertaning to listen to them try to process life. On the bus in Israel, Al and I were sitting right in front of these people, and we couldn't look at each other because we would just start cracking up. But more on that later.
The flight was long, but pretty uneventful. The food was surprisingly decent (look Mom, I'm eating!), and most of us were able to get a good amount of sleep. When the flight finally landed around 1:30PM (we were delayed almost two hours taking off), we went through Customs and got our bags without incident. We met up with the group to go out into the world, but two of our darling groupmates were missing because they had decided that now would be the perfect time to go to the bathroom and straighten their hair without telling anyone. The Cream of the Crop!
Once we found these two, we went outside into the delicious dry heat, met our Israeli staff, and got on the bus that will be our home for the next ten days. We were supposed to drive to Cesaria and check out the Roman aqueduct, but ran into awful traffic. So we ended up stopping at a strip mall and havng sandwiches. Unfortunately, they'd forgotten to get sandwich options for the veggies and ciliacs, so Binyamin (one of our tour guides) gave us money to get falafel at the mall, which was DELICIOUS!
We loaded back on the bus (the hair-straightening girls were late again), and drove 1.5 hours north to the hotel in Tiberias. We ate dinner, got our Israeli cell phones and changed money, then had some "group bonding" activities. At this point, it was about 10pm, so we were all exhausted and not really in the mood for bonding. However, Al and I did meet some nice, smart, and friendly women on our trip over dinner. There will be plenty of time for bonding once we've slept a bit.
We headed up to our hotel room - Al and I were lucky enough to snag a double with a balcony overlooking the sea (picture below!). We were exhausted, so crashed pretty early. Today, we're going hiking in the Golan Heights, then to a wine tasting! More on that later...
For now, we are safely in Israel, our group is not bad (and at least good for a laugh!), the country is beautiful, and we are excited for all the adventures to come!
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