Travel Day

Travel day...

The past several days seemed to blend together. A weekend of early take home exams, coupled with a Monday morning in-class exam and completing the move out process, led into what felt like a marathon mixed with anticipation and fleeting awareness.

We had a one and half hour delay on the runway, 7 hours to London Heathrow, mad rush to connecting flight to Tel Aviv, and a few hours of sleep here and there...and we arrived. Some of our colleagues had similar if not worse luck trying to get through Zurich and so we were able wait for a few hours at Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv Airport) and use the free wifi to get back on the grid.

Security...

Getting off the plane, Andrew and I were stopped by a few security officers literally as we walked out of the boarding ramp. The line of questioning was about what we were doing in Israel, if we had an invitation from the Technion, who we were travelling with, etc. Later, as we were going through customs, I chose to jump in a shorter line, while my colleagues all piled into a line together. I joked with them, saying something about throughput times and bottlenecks (an attempt at humor refe

rencing our recently completed Operations Management final). I boasted that I would finish first being in a shorter queue. However, when I came to the window, I became a bottleneck as I was subjected to further screening. Here are some of the questions:

• What are you doing here?
• Where are you staying?
• Who is in charge of your program?
• What is your father's name?
• What is your grandfather's name?
• ...and other, sometimes repeated, questions.

All this while my passport was handed through a window to a neighboring agent's booth, for verification I assume, and as she fumbled through our program manual (which I h

anded to her for proof of our program). All the while, the others in my group had made it through. They definitely gave me a hard time when I finally made it through. Perhaps it was my 5 o'clock shadow, tired look, my scrappy hair and beat up baseball cap that drew this attention? I also remember what I have been told about Israeli security and felt comfort in knowing that they were as thorough as they were with security. Even as we sat waiting for the others to come in, we had out passport and information checked by security since we were a large group and hadn't moved for an hour.

Haifa...
We rode in a mini-bus to Haifa from Tel Aviv and I basically passed out for the most of it. We arrived to our apartment after sun down and moved knowing only that our backyard had a fairly busy road below it. In the morning, though, we woke up to see that our backyard over looked the land below and between our apartment and the ocean.

Our apartment has 3 different floors. The main entry way opens to the kitchen, living, and dining space. The backyard is half patio and half turf, bordered by trees, bushes, and flowers, all framed in beautiful, blue Israeli skies. Stairs lead up to 4 rooms (2 solo rooms, and 2 double rooms). Femi and I share a room, Marc has his own room, Andrew and Shawn share a room, and Jonathan, our colleague from HBS, has his own. The 3rd floor is one room, the largest, shared by Jay and Ken (the two Chinese int'l students in our program).

Femi and I, are in the smallest room by far. Our twin sized beds have to be slide together in order to access the closet in our room. It's a pretty good match since Femi and I worked in a lot of groups together in the Fall and traveled together on the Alternative Winter Break trip I led in the Winter break. We also tend to snore also, so that probably was the determining factor in putting us in the same room :)