So this is my first blog post. I hope to be pretty good about updating my blog in the future to keep all my friends and family updated on my life in the Middle East and also to share aspects of Israeli culture with you all. Hopefully this blog post works because the page is in Hebrew, and I’m not really sure what I’m doing.
Anyway. The journey to Israel was not too eventful. I flew from Grand Rapids to Chicago to Warsaw to Tel Aviv, so it was a pretty long journey. I wasn’t nervous at all to move over here, but I was extremely nervous about packing my life up in just two 50-lb bags. But I invested in some space bags, where all the air is vacuumed out and managed to pack sheets, a blanket, and also a pillow along with a bunch of clothes and shoes. Kind of amazing. Also, weighing my bags at the airport, and one of them was 50.0 lbs, and the other was 50.5 lbs. Such a relief. However, after I finished congratulating myself and my mom on our excellent packing skills, when I went to check in for my flight out of ORD, the airline lady informed me that LOT Poland only allows one piece of checked luggage, and then I had to pay $78 for my second bag. After the whole extra piece of luggage debacle and the fact that my flight out of Grand Rapids was delayed 45 minutes and that I had to get an international boarding pass to leave the States and ORD is like the biggest most confusing airport ever and the terminal shuttles were being slow, I made it to my gate exactly 4 minutes before boarding time. In Chicago, I was meeting up with another girl from my program Alysha.
The flight to Warsaw was long and uncomfortable since my seat was in the very back row and people kept bumping into me on their way to the bathroom and there was no tv. We had a nearly 9-hour layover in Warsaw, so we bought a bus ticket at the airport and got off at a random stop in the city to explore a bit and managed to find Old Town Poland, which was really interesting. You can read about it a little bit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Old_Town
One thing that I wish I would have done before exploring Poland was to learn a few helpful phrases in Polish so that I could communicate with the locals a little and ask for directions and that sort of thing. Also I’ve found that most people are more than willing to share their culture with a foreigner who shows a genuine interest in their background, and to me, being at least able to ask if someone speaks English in their own tongue is a common courtesy that should be extended when traveling in foreign countries. Since we were mostly interested in wandering around and taking pictures and being a tourist, we totally got lost in the city for an hour or two but eventually found a stop for a bus that would take us back to the airport.
From Warsaw I flew to TLV, and this flight was also delayed. I finally made it to Israel at about 3am local time. I actually had no troubles at all getting into the country surprisingly and wasn’t even frisked once this time, which was a bit surprising to me considering all the trouble I had last year. We waited in the airport until about 7:30am because we couldn’t move in until 8am. While we were waiting we met a really nice Mexican man who was a pastor and didn’t speak any English, so we communicated through google translate on our computers for a little while. Also, the wheels on both of my pieces of luggage are broken. Pretty sure I’m never flying LOT Poland again…
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