Israel Episode 1 - Meet and Greet

My trip to Israel started around 4AM in Pittsburgh where I struggled to force myself out of bed and into the car to the airport. There, I said goodbye to Kate and her family, went through security... and realized I had forgotten my sandals. But at least I didn't miss my flight. No, I landed, as scheduled, six hours before my flight to Tel Aviv. I found a section of the Newark airport set up in cubicles for business people to work and I put down my bags and closed my eyes for a couple hours before willing myself up and over to the El Al check in desk to meet my friends for the next 12 days.

After awkwardly stumbling through some introductions, I heard someone mention that they were also named Aaron, but they went by Buddy. Now, I had a friend when I was 14 at summer camp whose name was Aaron but went by Buddy and I figured the chances of this being a coincidence were pretty small... Buddy didn't seem so sure of me at first, but we were able to connect the dots through the rememberance of our needing-to-be-censored performances on stage at the camp. We later reminisced about sumo wrestling each other and holding our bowel movements for 12 days straight... good times at Swig.

Anyway, we all then got our tickets... but only after being processed by El Al - a security screening that takes several minutes of answering questions about just how Jewish you are for them to be satisfied. Interesting note: all the people who were half-Jewish on the trip were later pulled aside for secondary screening while all the full Jews were let off the hook. But even with this intense screening process, we still had about 3.5 hours to hang out in the airport before our flight. As I was coming off 2 hours of sleep the night before, it was a struggle to stay focused and friendly for the new faces, but I think I managed alright. Though I must say that it was a bit alienating at first to meet everyone. This was a group of people that were so similar to me in a lot of ways (age, heritage, nationality) but worlds apart in terms of where we were at in our lives. You'd think that meeting fellow Americans would be easy after traveling around a bit, but there seems to be some sort of unofficial backpacker nationality as we share many common values setting us apart from our would-be peers. And I can't deny that this caused me to enter the trip with a certain amount of trepidation and hesitance at rejoining this now-foreign culture of people with these strange things called careers and cell-phones... but whatever gaps separated us at this onset disappeared completely after the first couple days of shared experiences.

Indeed, we were already starting to forge some bonds by the time we got on the plane; Elaun and Roy (our trip leaders) embarrassed us all by forcing us to play frisbee in the airport terminal and then Ashley (my seat buddy on the plane) gave some dirty looks to the stewardess when she tried to move me so that a Hassidic man didn't have to sit next to a woman. The flight passed relatively quickly for me, thanks in part to a sleeping pill, and we were in Tel Aviv before you could count to a million and a half backwards in Russian skipping prime numbers and multiples of 17.

And once there, we were once again forced into an embarrassing team building excercise where we all linked arms and jumped around like an uncordinated scrum of some sort of coed, Jewish rugby team, shouting the Hebrew words for "FRIENDS! FRIENDS! FRIENDS, FRIENDS, FRIENDS!" as the bemused/confused Israelis snapped blackmail pictures. Thankfully, we were then out of the airport and into our new home: the bus, or, as I affectionately nicknamed it, "The Bus." There, we met David, our infalliable, indefatigable driver and Vivi, our encyclopedic, orthopedic guide.

We all kind of stumbled through the rest of the day, dead on our feet before the trip had even begun. Consequently, after a quick jaunt to the Western Wall, a couple of opening activities, and the most heartlessly sung Shabbat songs in at least half a millenia, the leaders that be took pity on our, frankly, pitiful selves and sent us to bed early with the promise that we would get to sleep in the next day, Saturday, to catch up and take advantage of what is, after all, the day of rest...