First day/first two days

Even though it's been about 24 hours, I don't know if this is a summary of one day or two. Let's say two, because I've been awake long enough for two...


I'm holding a ticket here that says "Certificate of Kashruth". I got two of these babies today/todays, on my two in-flight meals. (For those of you wondering, yes, "kashruth" is what you say in Hebrew for "kosher"... which makes me wonder what language I've been speaking!) These tickets prove that the meals in question were prepared under the supervision of the "chief rabbi of El Al". For some reason I find this designation funny. What exactly is the rabbi's function at El Al, besides overseeing meals? Does he have a legion of sub-rabbis? Is their authority limited to desserts and sesame snaps??


Or perhaps they bless the small plastic box of chicken paste which permitted me to convert a mere BUN into a formidable CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH.


As we were landing, I thought about how before there were airplanes, there were no airplane toys. It was always possible to make a little wooden plane, and to imagine it flying. But no one could think of representing what didn't exist yet. Profound? I dunno, I'm pretty tired right now.


"Tea please?" asked the stewardess, walking up and down the aisle, offering people tea. "Tea please? Tea please?" Her accent excuses her unusual use of the word "please".


Sitting in the middle of a plane, out of sight of the windows, is very surreal. After a few hours of artificial lights and unconvincing rocking you begin to wonder if everything you know about geography was a hoax, and they've just stuck you in a chamber with some cool simulation effects and just changed the background scenery on the other end. This illusion is helped by the fact that so far, excluding some awesome reaches of desert sand -- which are at this moment very obscured by the haze -- all the modern conveniences are here in some form or other. For a while I believed my suspicion had always been correct that "other countries" is just a setting on some people's cameras.


But here I am indeed, having just come from a flurry of check-in procedures and orientations and tours. A few observations:


The sun seems brighter and bigger here somehow.


They have cement bus shelters.


There are many stray cats on campus, including indoors. They're very scrawny.


Israel has some good-coloured hills; well-equipped, too. You have the rocks, the shrubs, the non-deciduous trees all in the right place. It feels oddly familiar.


People speaking Hebrew to me (including children, awww) is pretty cool.


As far as I can tell, Israel has a smell. No worries, though; it's a good smell.


I'm going to head back to my dorm -- a 20-minute walk or so from the computer lab --  and probably collapse. Oh, but that reminds me, before I do I have to clear the stuff off my bed... the stuff that is on my bed because I'm in the middle of cleaning it... oh, fine, here comes the story.


At the airport, me and Lyera (I forgot to mention that she's my travel partner) were both questioned by El Al security. At one point the guy asked in his unusual accent, "Did anyone give you anything to bring to Israel? Anything at all?" Reflecting, I said, "Yeah, my friend gave me a rosary he bought there last year, which turned out to be a ripoff, and he wanted me to exchange it." Too much information? Probably! But then I remembered: "Oh, actually, Valeria took it in her luggage."


"So there is a friend?" he exclaimed, and there the fun began.


We were both told to arrive at the gate early for extra questioning. When we got there, he and his small staff took our carry-ons and searched through them, sometimes asking us questions about the contents, while we sat aside and had our feet (and feet alone) frisked. That was all fine, but then he said, "I'm afraid they found something in your luggage."


"Whose luggage?" we asked.


"Both your luggages," he answered.


I theorized that they had been suspicious of a plastic jar full of a thick, green liquid that I had brought. I laughed at myself for doing it afterwards, but I had bought some laundry detergent on a friend's recommendation, and since even the smallest jug was way more than I needed I poured what I did need into said jar.


Soon enough, as the last few passengers were trickling onto the plane, a man in a dark suit came by with a cardboard box containing a good number of my electronics. "These set off the device," he said. In there were, among other things, my power converter, alarm clock, and my phone charger -- all pretty essential things, and the last one irreplaceable on the fly.


There were also some things I didn't really need, so I said, "Oh, you can get rid of this and this," but as soon as I touched it the guy yanked it back into the box. Evidently, they thought my electronics had been tampered with to become extraordinarily dangerous. (Yep, my electric razor, too. You could totally nick a person's neck with that thing. Also a loose AAA battery.)


"Okay, no, I won't touch it, but you can just throw that one out," I said, once again volunteering unnecessary information.


Another man stepped in. "SIR, IT IS NOT YOUR CHOICE!" he declared.


At this point a woman came and sat with Lyera and me and explained that she would Purolator the items to me if I supplied with her my address in Israel. I was frustrated, but at least I would get them back, I thought. So I didn't argue any more but just took an inventory of what they had confiscated.


When this was over, Lyera asked about the suspicious items from her luggage. "Oh," said the guy who had questioned us, "uh, there was nothing. It was okay. You can go." And they sent both of us on our way.


Not so bad, I thought. So they rifled through my luggage and my clothing and whatnot, and probably packed it less efficiently too. But when we opened our luggage in the dorm, the first sign of oddity was that Lyera's suitcase contained a spoon, on top of everything else.


"I did not pack that spoon," she observed. Then she set about assessing the damage.


The spoon looked like one of the spoons I had brought, so I opened my suitcase too to have a look. The first thing I noticed was another of my spoons sitting on a pile of my (misplaced!) underwear, which they had tried unsuccessfully to stack. My goodness, I thought, they put the cutlery with the boxers? What were they -- 


Then I noticed the green patch on a pair of pants... and when I picked up a set of scissors it slipped out of my grip with the slimy lubrication. One by one I removed my objects, and way over half of them had laundry detergent on them or covering them... I set those on my desk, and the clean ones on my bed, the suitcase itself having a pool of laundry detergent at the bottom, until I found the empty jar.


I admit that the jar, tightly sealed though it was, might have been opened and leaked by normal plane turbulence, and maybe it wasn't El Al's fault. Two things to note, though: I had all my clothes in plastic bags, put on from both directions so there was no opening. If El Al hadn't taken them all out and let them float about loose, they probably would've been spared.


The other thing is that the jar was still closed when I took it out. So unless there was a very slow leak, they had opened it and tried to close it again.


I rarely get really frustrated about anything, but this was pretty ridiculous. On pretty much no basis, El Al's security took us aside for extra questioning and rummaged through our luggage. They confiscated several essential items (I have to severely limit my phone usage till that package arrives, and I can't plug anything in). Moreover, everyone brings power converters, alarm clocks, and charging cables on a flight, so I doubt these things actually set off their luggage-checking device; they probably just searched my suitcase for any electronics they could plausibly claim were dangerous. Afterwards, they suspiciously changed their story about whose luggage was dangerous at all. And they may have even accidentally opened and spilled the jar of laundry detergent all over my luggage, and at very least exposed the rest of my luggage to said detergent. Oh, and they broke my luggage lock in order to do it. El Al, world's most secure airline! What a joke!


Anyway, rant aside, I shouldn't let it detract from the fact that Jerusalem is lovely. Everything, from the vegetation to the architecture to the manners to the scenery to the air and sunlight, feels different in an exciting, if daunting, way. (And it's not even that hot!) I think I'm about at that inevitable stage where my dread suddenly does a 180.


I think I shall go walk that road back to the student village, wash as much luggage as I can, ask someone where the laundry service is (at least I won't need to bring detergent!), and then crash on my bed.


P.S. Oh, yeah, actual Hebrew learning report: used the flight time to learn to read the Hebrew alphabet, when it has the (easy mode) vowels inserted, from a book -- and with the help of a kindly couple who spoke it as a first language. And I bought a copy of the Torah in Biblical Hebrew. Oh, and today/todays I learned that Hebrew has the same punctuation as English, and it's not even flipped right-to-left, which makes it look very funny. Backwards commas and question marks all over the place.