Plane trip

Hey, so the first real blog of the trip. This is mostly about the plane ride, which was an adventure all of its own. Read and enjoy.

Amelia and I left Provo at four in the morning to get there, and I was panicking about getting there on time. Thankfully, we made it before the check lines even opened, so I actually spent a while just standing there waiting for them to check our baggage. I was so tired, I had gotten up at 2:45--nothing at all seemed like it was actually happening. The plane to Denver was tiny and I wasn't able to sit next to the window so I just tried to sleep. It was a short ride, a little over an hour, as we flew, the sun rose over the mountains but it was shadowed by some clouds in the East. I've still never driven further east than Utah, so it was wonderful to see this part of the country even if only from the aisle seat of a tiny airplane.... When we landed haze completely hid the sky, so all I could see the tundra that stretches out all 360 degrees around the airport.

Denver turned out to be very interesting.
The moment we got off the plane, we all had to rush down about 30 gates to get to our next flight which was bording in ten minutes. But, for some reason unbeknownst to me, my ticket was for a flight that left 2 hours later than everyone elses.That meant that I had to walk almost a mile around the airport (it seemed like that, the Denver airport is monsterously huge) and then find somewhere to sit at my terminal and try not to die from exhaustion. I thought I was going alone, but God is good, and when I opened my eyes after napping for a moment, another girl from the program was sitting in front of me. It seemed she had a halo shining around her bright red hair. Her situation was identical to mine. It turned out that we were the only Jerusalem Center people on the plane, but that fortunately, we would be on the same plane as everyone else in DC. In affect, instead of waiting for two hours longer in Washington, we waited in Denver.

It turns out that this God sent redhead, Hilary, spent last summer in India. The way she talked about it, it was like she left half of her heart there. Just hearing about a really foreign country and someone who was obviously in love with it made me ridiculously impatient to get here. To my dismay, her ticket placed her across the aisle from me on the flight. My seat mate was a girl from San Diego on her way to a study abroad program in France for a semester. She seemed pretty surprised that my study abroad program was to the Holy land, because, who does that really?

Washington was exactly like it should have been. Forested, pleasant, and what I could see from the plane, full of those nice white houses and picket fences. iIwas eager to see the actual city but I didn't get a glimpse of it. There were several very large quarries which were dug straight down from the middle of the golf park like meadows-- the rock was stratified, reds, whites and yellows. It sort of reminded me of Jupiter. Who would have thought DC would be like Jupiter.

But anyway, we'd flown United on both of the first flights, and the next two were Austrian airlines which, except for their choice in upholstry (forest green seats with bright red, yellow and white head rests), was a rather nice airline: they gave use two meals on our way to Vienna, several beverages, not to mention the Flight attendants were several notches less choleric than the ones from the flights before. I had planned to spend this entire flight sleeping, hopefully with the aid of some benevolant student's tylonal pm, but the alternate was better. I was the only person in our group not seated next to a student, instead I sat next to an extremely pleasant, 30 somethings, woman from Tel Aviv who was going on the same flight we were from Vienna to her city. She had been living in Washington for the past year because her husband was working on his Post doc in Georgetown. We spent the entire flight, except for an hour and a half reprive, discussing the situation in Israel, what it is really like to serve in the military, my dad's job (she ADORES NCIS, particularly Ziva David), and various random psychologies. She was fascinating.

Apparently, if you are an Israeli, you are essentially shut of from the ENTIRE Middle Eastern world. She said it was unwise to go to any country in the Middle East... I asked her specifically if an Israeli could go to Egypt, and she gave me the example of a tiny resort town on the borders of the Red Sea which was the only exception to this general rule of no entrance. It astounded me, like living in california and never being allowed to go to any of the rest of North America, not even to Nevada.

Something else she said that was fascinating to me was how what she really loves about the US. It wasn't the prosperity--Tel Aviv is a very affluent city-- but the way that all of these extremely different cultures are able to live amicably with each other. She had never experienced that in depth before. DC is particularly diverse, and while it may have a high crime rate, the hate that she had grown up just isn't there.

Another thing she couldn't get over about the US is the affect of not being at war. We have the luxury to invest in universities, to spend a lot of our inventing energy on things which aren't military related, and to go for a walk in the park and say hi and smile to the person walking by you. That was something she mentioned a lot--that we say hi to everyone we pass by. Aparently, they don't do that really in Tel Aviv.

One of the hardest things was not letting on to my religion. I wasn't sure if the agreement not to preach in Israel could be extended to talking to an Israeli on the way to Israel.

She seemed a lot younger than she was, and we felt completely comfortable with each other. If the people of Israel are like her, I am going to make of lot of friends. In Vienna, we hung out for a while, watching a Ukranian, deaf men's group across from us and talking more about languages. After going through a second set of security, we sat in the waiting room before getting onto the final plane. A handsome Israeli started talking to us quite forthrightly there... pretty soon he was asking us about the exact theology of Mormonism. I had no clue what I could or couldn't tell him, but someone had suggested that we stay on the safe side, so we told him about the agreement with Israel and said that we couldn't say anything else. I really didn't want to be responsible for the down fall of the Jerusalem Center or anything. Thinking about it now, I realize that we probably could have talked to him about it since we were in Vienna Austria, but I can't change it now. He was not very happy with this arrangment--actually, I think he was rather mad. But it wasn't at us, he just kept going on and on about the Israeli government and how ridiculous they were. He is from Jerusalem and he considers himself to be a citizen of Jerusalem instead of a citizen of Israel, even though he is Jewish. It was a very odd experience, but worthwhile. It is always interesting to meet new people.

It already began to feel like the Middle East on the plane. The people who got on with us were obviously very Jewish, Muslim or tourists. I fell asleep several times on that plane flight, mostly because where I was sitting I couldn't see out the window, even though I would have loved to watch us fly over Greece and Turkey. By this time, we had been traveling for 18 hours straight. Getting off the plane, it wasn't nearly as hot as I had expected it to be. My first thought was that though Tel Aviv had a lot less windows in its skyscrapers than the ones in the US, it was still a lot like LA. This idea changed pretty rapidly when I realized that we really were somewhere else. every other person was dressed in really religious or militaristic clothing. If they weren't one of those two, they were more modern Middle Eastern peoples or tourists. The airport is beautiful by the way, if you get the chance, you should look at some pictures of it. It has an incredible waterfall which descends in a column from a cut out circle at the base of an inverted dome in the ceiling. Like everything else, it is limestone.

Customs was easier than I expected.
"Where are you going to school"
"BYU, but I'm going to the Jerusalem Center"
"Do you have any proof of your acceptance?"
"No, but I do have this name tag!" (Smiles hopefully)
I don't know if i was just imagining it, but I think the lady may have just been irritated by my excitment and she shooed me on. In my eternal idiocy, I left the larger of my two knee braces at the airport. They're working on getting it here.

The drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem really was like going back in time. From utter modernity, we went to the hills where in 1948 the convoys trying to get to the beseiged Jerusalem were attacked by the neighboring Arab villiages (I was particularly excited to see this, I had read quite a bit about it in "O Jerusalem"), to some abandoned Arab villages, to seeing the edge of western, Jewish jerusalem on the top of the far hill and finally, to driving along the South of the city and gazing in utter awe at the hugeness and uniqueness of it. The dome of the rock is the most immediately obvious site, then there are the dozens of other domes, steeples, minerets and hotels that carve the skyline. The Jerusalem Center is just as beautiful in real life as it is in the pictures, and it is extremely comfortable and well kept. They say, and they're right, that it is temple quality.

I recognized some of the plants since this is a mediterranian area like California, but there are some birds and bushes which are completely foreign to me. I'm excited to learn to recognize them. My favorite part of yesterday though was the evening after I got to my beautiful, open, and for now, completely clean room (you would not believe how nice our accomidations are. I love them, and our porches are HUGE! with an incredible view, my bed doesn't squeak and the showers are heaven.) and (to continue this overly long sentence) standing on the porch as the sun set over western Jerusalem and hearing the calls to prayer. The loudest was coming from the loud speakers of a palestinian village on the hill right next to us (the mount of olives fyi) but when it would pause, you could here the higher or lower tones of the other Minerets across the city. It was as though the city itself was singing. The air was thick with it.

Because it is ramadan, the city is full of lights--they light up their houses in celebration just like we do for Christmas. After the sun set, some fire works (which sounded like bombs, and sort of looked like them) went off and the partying began. I'm really lucky to be here now, Ramadan is a very unique time of year. After dinner (all middle eastern food in our cafeteria, really good food) we had a tour of the center and some orientation. I feel like I've been oriented to something or other a hundred times in the past week. Finally getting into bed was like heaven. I woke to the call for prayer at 4:30 and got up at 4:45 to go do my homework, which we already have a lot of. I hope to do most of my homework at the beginning of each week so I can have more time to spend in the city.

Next coming... the first trip into the Old City.