Traveling and My First Few Days in Israel

I use to have more fun traveling on airplanes. Now it is boring and uncomfortable, usually tolerable, but not fun. Maybe I simply haven’t learned how to successfully travel long distance by airplane? If you have a method please let me know.

I spent almost as much time waiting in airports as I did in the air. It was like being in the movie Terminal, except I was confined to three different terminals—Anchorage, Seattle and London. London’s Heathrow Terminal 5 was very nice. Interesting shops, many people, and food choices ranging from a Gordon Ramsey restaurant to pub food to sushi.

I obtained a student visa while in the United States so I was able to breeze through passport control in Israel. (One of my contacts here at the University told me that I was issued the wrong type of visa, however it worked). I had read that there might be a fee associated with bringing electronic equipment into Israel (computer and camera) but no one at customs even checked my bags.

My pre-arranged taxi was waiting at the exit. The weather was cool, in the 40’s, but much warmer than the -7 degrees in Anchorage. It was a smooth highway to Jerusalem and we arrived in less than 45 minutes. The driver had my apartment key and helped me get my bags to the 4th floor of the building.

My Housing

The apartment is in a complex of 8 or 10 buildings, 5 to 10 stories each. This is student housing for Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is referred to as the student village. Residents are required to show a Hebrew University ID when entering the complex.
The apartment is similar to a dorm suite with three identical bedrooms, a shower room with a sink, a toilet room, a small sitting room with a balcony and a kitchen.

The furnishings are in a style I would describe as institutional modern. One of the bedrooms has an additional steel door that closes over the wood door. The window also has an additional steel shutter in addition to the aluminum shutter. My impression is that this is a safe room or a shelter of some kind.
The kitchen has a full size refrigerator, gas range, small counter top oven and a microwave. There are enough dishes to keep a kosher kitchen although there is only one set of flatware and one set of cookware. There also seems to be enough towels, blankets, and sheets for when my family arrives to join me.

The cold shower motivated me to figure out that there were two switches that activated the hot water heater. I’ve been advised to turn it on 30 minutes prior to wanting a hot shower. I haven’t figured out how to adequately regulate the heat, but I only seem to need that some evenings.

First Day Activities
I was determined to stay up as long as possible my first day, a brutal way of forcing the body to adjust to the new time zone. It was also a bright sunny day in the high 50s or low 60s, after 10 days of below 0 temperatures in Anchorage I also wanted to warm my bones and get a dose of vitamin D.

It also occurred to me that this secure housing complex required an ID to enter; while I had the keys to the apartment I had no University ID. I guess my mind wasn’t too addled by the time change. I followed the stream of students walking to the South, figuring that they would lead me to the University. In less than 10 minutes I was at the entrance to the Mt. Scopus Campus of Hebrew University. After showing my letters of appointment to University Security I was allowed to pass through the magnetometers, my bag was also examined. I met an anthropology professor who guided me to the office of visiting faculty.

The extremely helpful and friendly woman from the office of visiting faculty said that she deals with 150 visiting faculty and post-doctoral students each year. Thus the University has information and systems in-place to orient and accommodate people like me. I easily obtained a picture ID. The Office of Visiting Faculty also made arrangements for me to get further settled by meeting with the Director of the Lady Davis Fellowship (my sponsor) and the Director of Housing. These offices are at the other Hebrew University campus across town in Givat Ram.

On my walk to the University I had my first glimpse of the Old City. The iconic Dome of the Rock was right in front of me. Nearly every picture of Jerusalem features the Dome of the Rock; television reporters often have the Dome over their shoulder as they discuss some event in Israel. It was exhilarating to see it, similar to seeing the Eifel Tower or the Empire State Building for the first time. Now I can see those classic pictures of Jerusalem and say, “I’ve been there.” At the same time I couldn’t help but think, “I thought it was bigger.”

A Country at War
Arriving at Ben-Gurion airport I had no sense that this was a country at war. I breezed through passport control and no one at customs looked at my bags. I saw no soldiers or weapons. The same is true for the drive from the airport to Jerusalem.

I’d say the same is true for Jerusalem. There are some soldiers and other uniformed personnel on streets and they carry large weapons, but I’ve seen that in Europe also (e.g. Italy). There were a large number of soldiers at the Central Bus Station; they appeared to be traveling somewhere. I don’t have previous Israel travel experience to answer the question as to whether there are more soldiers around than usual.

I have heard, but not seen, fighter jets in the sky (but I hear those in Anchorage). Also a few military helicopters have flown over, but again that happens in Anchorage. From my naive perspective in Jerusalem, it doesn’t seem like a country at war. I’m sure the situation is much different in the South.

Editorial Digressions
While observing the multilingual, multicultural, multi-clothed crowd at Heathrow I thought about how Americans view the rest of the world. It is easy to become insular in the United States. This may be partly geographic, to the North a country very similar with the same roots, to the East and West large oceans, only to the South a population who is culturally different and speaks a language other than English (but we are building a boarder fence to keep them out). Within the US the indigenous people have been colonized and marginalized. At its extreme (hopefully extreme) the United State’s insularity is expressed in jingoistic or xenophobic rhetoric. A result is that some people develop the belief that they don’t have to travel outside the United States (think Sarah Palin), that foreign travel is only an elitist luxury, rather than a civic responsibility.

On a scale of religious attentiveness, with 1 being not attentive and 10 being zealously attentive, I would place myself at a 2 or 3. Therefore I was surprised at my reaction as the plane was descending into Ben-Gurion airport. I felt an unexpected exuberance arriving at a place full of “my people” – what my grandfather referred to as landsman. While some of the elation may have been due to simply knowing my long air travel was ending and my journey in Israel beginning, landing in Israel was different than arriving in Dublin or Luxembourg or Paris after long flights.