Sleepless in Tel Aviv.

So aside from feeling 25 pounds heavier, I'm feeling pretty adventurous. The day I am writing this exact entry is Wednesday, June 9th, 2010. I decided that I'm going to go through my "Holy Land Journal", re-live the memories, and write blog entries for each day. I promised you guys blog entries, so you're going to get blog entries! But don't worry, this isn't going to be a 12 page essay, I'm going to do it one day at a time. At the moment I am still in Israel, staying at a wonderful house with wonderful people who have wonderful wireless internet, so I'm taking this time to write a blog entry. So here we go, here is May 23rd:

Israel, we have arrived!! You should've felt that rush of excitement I felt as the landing gear began to wake up. I'm also excited to say that I survived an 11 hour flight. How, you may ask? Well, the usual way: read some more Nicholas Sparks, made friends with the middle eastern twin of one of my uncles from back home, watched half of Lovely Bones, watched all of the Tooth Fairy (Elena you're gonna love me!!), fell asleep during Leap Year, considered watching Dear John again, ate chicken penne pasta, only got up from my seat ONCE, ate half of my breakfast (if you were there, you would've seen why), and listened to ALOT of music. Honestly, I think I wore my headphones for a total of 8 hours straight, even when I went to the bathroom that one time. Haha...

All 51 people on this tour are SO incredibly nice. It's amazing how welcoming these 40-70 year olds are of little, immature 19 year-olds. I can tell already that some great conversations are about to take place in the near future. Alot of them have even heard of the little Mennonite community I live in. It's sure somethin' special.


So anyway, we arrived in Tel Aviv at around 7 pm, this is the airport. This area of the airport is about 5 years old now! Pretty nice I'd say. 

We met our driver and tour guide for the first time, and then hopped on the bus to our very first Israeli hotel experience. Alexander Suites Hotel = Awesome. Mine and Charmaine's suite included two bedrooms w/ king-sized beds (but of course we slept in the same room ha), 2 bathrooms, kitchen, dining room, living room, tall windows with long sheer curtains, 3 TV's, a lime green couch, and last but not least a phone in the bathroom! (how awesome would that be?)

What's even greater about this hotel is that it's a 20 second walk from the Mediterranean Sea. Now, this is a big deal to me since I have never even been CLOSE to this body of water. Therefore, it was a must to go and dip my toes in it, and it was extremely warm. :) What's also near this beach is a night club. No, I didn't GO in it, that's not what I'm getting at. What I noticed was that it had a line up by the door and I was all confused because really, who goes clubbing on a sunday night? So what I soon found out was that in Israel, their work-week is from Sunday to Thursday (with their Sabbath day, also known as Shabbat being Friday evening 'till Saturday evening) , so it makes sense that the clubs are open on a sunday night. I just thought this was interesting...

Oh what also happened on this beach was that I met an Israeli cat. (Life goal = accomplished) Apparently stray cats and dogs are EVERYWHERE here, and it's best not to touch them. Whoops!
So before going to bed, Char and I met everyone at dinner, and then continued our tradition of Gilmore Girls. We went to bed at midnight, and guess what time I woke up? 3 AM, giving me a total of 3 hours of sleep. Brutal. Israel is 8 hours ahead of Manitoba time, so bring on the jet lag. Being awake at 3 AM in Israel, there was only one thing to do. I pulled out my laptop and started righting this blog entry. Little did I know, I brought the wrong adapter plug, so when my computer died...it really just...died, and I couldn't do anything about it. I then took the longest shower in the world. As a matter of a fact, I enjoy showering at 4 AM, it's great.