Day 1

Flights from Calgary to Germany.
No sleep was to be had on this flight, although I spent much of the flight in a bit of a musical daze. Thank goodness for iPods to drown out snoring. Listening to music is a lovely way to spend hours and hours of plane rides. A not so good way to spend one’s time is listening to your seatmate jabber on about this and that, and how horrid her last pedicure was, and how awful her hair must look right now. I felt quite sorry for the poor man who got to suffer through this ordeal for nine hours. Although, to be fair, it did ensure that the man exited the aircraft very swiftly, allowing all the passengers behind to exit more quickly.
Note to self…people who work in German airports do not like it when you attempt to race them down hallways, no matter how much caffeine you have had in the last hour. What they do like, however, is when you are asked to take off your sweater, revealing a small tank top. Especially if it is five am local time, and they are rather old gentleman. I have never been so thankful to get through security before.

Right now I am sitting in a lounge surrounded by people a language I do not know. An alarm is going off in the background, and there is a short Jewish man wrapping himself in leather straps, and what looks like a hand made shawl. He is deep in prayer, swaying back and forth, and tears are rolling down his face, He has Bible verses in the small square box strapped to his head as well as on the leather straps that now cover his arm. His hands are clutched to a small book in his hand, and he is quietly reciting the words over and over. No one is paying him much attention; they are more focused on the noisy alarm that is still going off.

We found out later that the alarm was not caused by the Jewish man being behind barriers; it was, in fact, Dad’s alarm that he did not notice because he was watching a movie.

Flight from Frankfurt to Tel-Aviv was uneventful at best, and I got a total of one hour of sleep the whole way here. Once in the airport, we were rushed through customs by a man who works for the tour guide company, and then we were escorted to our ‘buses. In Canada these would be called mini-vans, but here they are enormous inconvenient vehicles, no bigger than the Beast.

After we unpacked a bit at the hotel we ran..yes ran to the beach to dip our toes in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s amazing how much more energy we had when we saw the beach. We had dinner at a small, albeit fancy, restaurant. The atmosphere was lovely, between yummy seafood, the beach, and SEVERAL stray cats…apparently these are a common problem here.
After dining we strolled on the beach back to the hotel, where we decided we needed ice cream. So it was back to the beach where we stuffed ourselves with various sugar filled, creamy, delicious, ice cream.
Finally it is time to crash. Good night world.