A quick note about England before I start talking about the Middle East (ME). It has to be the most expensive place in the world. I had heard about how expensive it is, but until you're there spending your own money, you don't really understand. It's basically the same price numerically as dollars, except it's in pounds, which are worth twice as much. For instance, a bag of chips and a fanta were 2 pounds, a short taxi to the heathrow holiday in was 17 pounds, the breakfast buffet at the holiday in (which I didn't get) was 15 pounds. Good gravy.
I arrive in the ME at Tel Aviv Airport. I'm quickly able to get through security, and the airport has this amazing layout as your walking out. You walk around a circular pathway that is about ~30 feet high. It's glassed in so you can see down to the ground level where there is a food court and some people can see there families there waiting for them, even though they still need to wait for their bags. The high ceiling drops down low in a spherical shape, and a circle is cut out of the bottom of the sphere. Falling from the edges of the circle are drops of water. I really thought it looked amazing for an airport. I would have taken pictures, but as I said, the power had run out of my cell phone.
Amir, one of the members of the board of meet, is waiting there to pick me up. Driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I notice 2 things about the way towns are built. The first is a how groups of houses are tightly built together. When you look at villages across a landscape there is a very clear distinction. A clump of houses in one place, then barren land for a period, and then another clump of houses. It isn't continuous at all, and it seems like where there is a village, the houses don't get much land space at all. Also, as we drove into Jerusalem through the judea mountains, I noticed how prevalent it was to build a village either into a mountainside or on the highground. I suspect, although I'm not certain, both of these layouts are for defense reasons, although that is a guess.
I arrive at our apartment, and it's much nicer than I expected. The view from the patio is great, here are some shots at sunrise and one at dusk.
We leave for a tour and then dinner, but our tour will be shortened for reasons I'll get to in a second. The first place we visit is the wall of the old city. Tali thinks it was last rebuilt by the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s.
In the distance though you can also see the wall that Israel built separating it from the West Bank. You can see it in these pictures in grey at the crest of the hill.
After the wall, we attempted to check out the MEET lab that they using during the year on their year-long projects. I say attempt because half the group got almost to the floor it’s on, and the elevator proceeded to break. They pried the doors open and got out, but we quickly realized that the elevator was no longer going to work. There was an emergency door entrance, however this was locked and we didn’t seem to have the key. So half of the group was trapped upstairs with no exit, and the other half were downstairs at the emergency exit. After entertaining some other options, the group decided that it would be best to smash the lock and try to open the door that way.
As you can imagine, this created a lot of noise, and being Shabbat, the jewish day of rest, we quickly had an old lady who lived downstairs yelling at us. After some angry words in hewbrew (of which I understood none) she agreed to get us some tools and with the help of another neighbor, we were able to get the door open. Inside was a very nice lab where MEET has students work on their yearlong projects.
This brings up something I’ve noticed about Israel that I haven’t seen in other places. When I’ve traveled before, it’s either been to very industrialized nations (around the US, Canada, and western Europe) where everything is very organized, clean, and in working order. Conversely I’ve been to places like Costa Rica that are very third world. Lots of things may be broken, the roads are kind of a mess, and you just have to go with the flow when things don’t work. Israel seems to be smack in the middle of that. The roads are great, and many buildings are very modern. Conversely though there are definitely sections that seem very “unfinished”. As we drove though one of the poorer sections of Jerusalem, the housing seemed to be much worse than anything you would see in the US. The attitude when an elevator breaks wasn’t to try to find someone to fix it, but was instead to “smash the lock in.” While love smashing stuff, I feel like this would never happen in the US. I’m not hating, it was Shabbat and it would have been hard to find someone to fix the problem, so what else can you do? But I found it interesting nonetheless.
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