Long Flight---Getting Settled In

SHALOM!

From where we left off last time, a lot has happened in a "short" period of time.

The Flight
-The plane ride to Israel on El-Al's 747 carrier was an experience in its self. I sat next in the middle of two people that were on my trip, Aaron and Lily, nice people from Seattle. On the plane they served a bunch of different meals, but they all looked as if someone had throw-up onto a platter and moved the throw-up into designated squares, in order for it to feel like meal. The reason why this plane ride was different from any other I've been on, was the fact that after falling asleep in the middle of the flight I woke up and we had landed, just not in Israel...I look out the window and start clapping and cheering, like everyone usually does because I thought we had reached the promise land. I turned to my right and I say to Aaron "Wow, that was a long flight, thank god its done" and he replied "We are not their yet, we are in Warsaw, Poland because someone was sick". My first reaction was to be pissed off because the plane was very smelly and it felt like we were sitting in a desert, and to add onto that there were no manual air-blower thingys. But then I figured out that it wasn't actually a bad thing that we had stopped in Poland, because during the long 45 minutes we were at the airport waiting I bonded with a bunch of new people and talked about our similarities and differences. After we left Poland it was another four hours until our destination, and it felt like a decade.

The Dorm

Jake (left) Aaron (right), in the "living" room

-We are staying in Hod Ha' Sharon right outside of Tel-Aviv and can't really tell you what it looks like because we came in at night, and everything kind of looks the same at night. After having a nice Hanukkah meal as a group we then unloaded our bags into our designated rooms. One word to describe the rooms that we are staying in is unpredictable. I was expecting more of a college-feel to the rooms with everyone on floors and having two people to a room, typical college living quarters. But instead, for better or worse, the rooms consist of two separate areas one for sleeping and one for "living", both relatively a good size. Also the building that we are in looks like a two-storyn apartment complex. My four roommates are from Seattle, Maryland, and Minnesota. Aaron (the one sat next to on the plane) is a very tall guy who has a nice sense of humor, Jake is from Maryland and looks exactly like Ely Harel, and last Noah who is from Minnesota, I have known for a while and is another cool person.