Israel: The Trip Begins

I figure it's going to take while to get this vacation blogged, so I better start while it is still fresh in my mind.  Thanks to a generous gesture from a friend, I was able to trade my junior vacation slot of September for her June slot (which goes more senior).  Ladyfriend and I then decided we would take a big vacation and hands down, we wanted to go to Israel.

Given that I get passes for standby travel, it was hard to swallow paying for airplane tickets, but it was summer and we did not want to have to spend multiple days trying to get there or get home and we had a tour booked, so we needed to be there on time.  In the end it was a smart call as all our flights were full, so there is no way we would have made it going standby.  Plus I could dress in jeans and a t-shirt since we were full fare.

We left on Thursday afternoon, stopping once in Atlanta and again in Paris.  The trip over to Paris was nice.  We had two seats by ourselves and plenty of space.  We were not seated together on the flight from Paris to Tel Aviv, so when we inquired about switching seats, a guy offered up his seats.  Little did we know they were in the last row and didn't recline and were in a zone surrounded by screaming kids.  Kirsten and I decided this was the worst flight we had ever been on.

We landed in Tel Aviv around 4pm on Friday.  A representative from our tour company was waiting for us in customs and arranged our taxi to the hotel.

We stayed on the beach in Tel Aviv, along the Mediterranean.  We checked in, got to our room and changed into some fresh clothes and went down and walked along the promenade near the beach and had dinner.  They have lot of open air restaurants and it is fun to sit and watch the many people passing by, or the sunset, etc. etc.

The next day, since it was Shabbat (Jewish day of rest) and we would not be doing an scheduled sightseeing, we decided to walk down to Jaffa.  Jaffa was the old town, original settlement, that eventually spawned Tel Aviv.  Jaffa was largely Arab until Israeli independence, so there are both a mosque and a church on the site of the old city.  Jaffa first showed up on the radar in 1470 B.C. when it was taken over by the Egyptians.  In Biblical times, it is also the point where Jonah sets out on his ill fated sea voyage (where he gets swallowed by the whale) and it was the port where King Solomon had his cedar from Lebanon landed for building his temple in Jerusalem.  Jaffa still has a small Israeli Arab population.

This monument, called the Gate of Faith, or Jacob's Dream, was sculpted by a man named Daniel Kafri in 1974.  The goal was to inspire the Jewish people to return to Torah.  There are two pillars: one depicting the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, the highest expression of faith, and the second shows Jacob's dream where the Angel of the Lord appears before him and promises that his people would inherit the land.  The top beam depicts Joshua and the patriarchs passing thru Jericho on their way to the promised land.

It was a rather warm day, but we were glad we got out and around to see some of the local sights since we really didn't have any scheduled touring in Tel Aviv.  On the way to and from Jaffa, we walked past the Dolphinarium Memorial.  It was a disco that was blown up by a Hamas suicide bomber in 2001.  132 people were injured and 21 Israeli's were killed. Most were Russian Jews who had immigrated from the Soviet Union.  The building has never been torn down or rebuilt, so it's just sort of a fenced off shell along the bustling beach.  Very sad.

We spent a little time down by the water and then enjoyed dinner at another restaurant along the promenade and watched the sunset.