It was easy to be a little intimidated about flying to Israel for the first time. But it turns out that everyone speaks English and we haven’t had any trouble navigating around. The security measures at the airport were no tighter than what we’ve seen in any other cities. I had pretty low expectations for the entry and exit of the country, but so far so good. It’s not too expensive if you ignore the fact that the value of the dollar has been in a freefall. (Hooray that my salary is in Swiss Francs!) We’ve only been here for one evening so far. We’re staying in Tel Aviv for the night.
Tomorrow morning we get on another flight (ugh–you’re supposed to get to the airport 3 hours early 🙁 ) to Petra. We couldn’t just go to Petra today because the connections you need to get from Zurich to Petra are just synchronized horribly. The lady at the airport information desk told us that she’s never heard of flight number RJ343, and we should call ahead to make sure it really exists. 😕 But we checked with Royal Jordanian customer service and the recording assured us that the flight is still scheduled. She had us scared though. I am still not counting on there really being a flight for us. But we hope so! Wish us luck, we may need a lot if it.
It is nice to already feel like we are on vacation though. We spent the evening walking along the beach and piers and then finished off the night with a really good ice cream and a dip in the hotel’s hot tub. Everyone here is really into 80’s American songs. There’s only twice that we’ve heard local music. The first time was from a restaurant that was actually playing Miles Davis, but until I saw the album cover I assumed that it was a crazy atonal ethnic tune. It feels like we have to go out of our way to notice things that remind us we are in a new place.