!אני מגיע לישראל

The snow put a damper on things Sunday night. The L wasn't running and the M14 bus took so long to get to 8th ave that a cab to JFK became a necessity. Virgin Atlanta is a pretty classy establishment. They put up with my elaborate luggage rearrangments after finding out that the one-way carry-on filled with gifts (I'm leaving it in Israel) was way too heavy to actually carry on. In the end I ended up with a small day pack of the bare essentials as my only carry on and crossed my fingers that my checked luggage would make it okay.

I didn't cross them hard enough. We were held up for over 2 hours on the tarmac while they searched fruitlessly for a tow with chained wheels, gave up and equipped an existing tow with chain wheels, and de-iced the plane (a pretty cool spectacle to witness. It felt like a going through the car wash as a kid). Despite some beneficial wind streams that brought us to London in only 5 hours, there still wasn't enough time for any of us to catch our connecting flight to Tel Aviv. 3 trips through security and back and forth across Heathrow later and I got a boarding pass for an El Al Flight leaving an hour and a half later, plus a pretty good understanding of how to get around Heathrow. An hour and a half seemed like plenty of time for them to load up our luggage off of Virgin and onto El Al. No such luck, and there was a massive line at the El Al lost-and-found in Tel Aviv as a result. Hopefully it'll just be a day or two before I get my stuff.

Oh well, it happens. The flights were comfortable and went by quickly. I also finally got to watch Wall-E (man, those boys at Pixar just don't miss) on the flight and got a decent amount of sleep. More importantly I got here safely, had no problems with security or customs, and got picked up by my cousins Assaf and Rachel Gazit upon arrival. I've also already learned a bunch about what to pack for a carry on and what just takes up space, how to get my bag dissassembled fast enough to not piss off people behind me, and how best to get through airport security, and that's all very important.

I'm at Assaf's apartment in Ramat Gan, now. It's a gorgeous apartment right next door to Tel Aviv. Tomorrow I'm heading into the city to try to meet up with a couple friends, to get a quad band cell phone, and maybe to stop by Ulpan Gordon to schedule a time for my Hebrew placement exam. Rachel found me a great furnished apartment sublet on the beach that I'll probably get to see tomorrow too. I hope the price is right!

Yaron is excited!