It's so dangerous to say anything online these days, and it feels wrong to say nothing and continue posting the ordinary stuff of my life. I expect this will be my only post on the subject.

Targeting civilians is barbaric. Full stop. There can be no justification for such acts.

Gaza also has a border with Egypt. Maybe the neighbor that wasn't brutally attacked could help Gazan civilians get out?

Gaza elected Hamas. I would normally assume a rigged election or ballots at gunpoint, but to my surprise, I haven't heard anyone make that argument in all this time.

I weep for all innocent bystanders who are harmed or killed in war. One side targets them; the other takes extraordinary steps to protect them even to its own detriment. I wish everyone understood that all human beings are made in the divine image and life is precious.

Peace requires two parties who want it. I pray that day comes soon. Until then, I pray that Israel has the strength to defend itself from barbaric assaults, effectively and with as little collateral damage as possible.

Ken y'hi r'tzono.

I'm supposed to be 2+ hours into a flight right now. But apparently I'm not allowed to have nice things, and Air Canada needed to go for a clean sweep. Ten (!) hour delay this time! The mind boggles.

BTW, even though they had my email address and (local) phone number, there was no contact. I knew I couldn't print a boarding pass at the hotel and Internet there was kind of expensive anyway, so I didn't see it before I left. (Though I don't know if it was even posted; someone behind me in line said he had checked a couple hours earlier.)

They wanted to put me on a combination that would get me home around noon tomorrow. I asked if they could do any better and explained the urgency. After more than three hours of standing in lines I have a flight through Newark that gets me there around 8AM. And, learning from history, I confirmed that if that connection fails, there's another flight an hour later. They claimed to be unable to put me on the El Al flight leaving at 4PM for bureaucratic reasons, grumble.

This may surprise some given the comments in another thread, but most of the agents I've dealt with here have been polite. (One seemed to have no respect for the queue, though; she kept pushing me aside because I was going to be here all day anyway, but I didn't want to be in her Internet-deprived office all day! Sheesh.)

I came to the airport hoping to get an upgrade as partial compensation for the difficulties they caused on my trip here. Instead I'm begging for a flight home a mere 10-12 hours late and, of course, I'll get whatever seat nobody else wanted (middle, I assume) and I have to assume I won't be able to eat the meal and plan accordingly. I will be contacting Air Canada's customer service when I get home, and frankly, I want a full refund. This is freaking ridiculous.

I'm done with Air Canada after this. I might also be done with Israel; we'll see when I calm down more. It is too frustrating to try to get there and back from Pittsburgh. At the very least I am done with solo major travel.

I just registered for the Shalom Hartman Institute summer program in Jerusalem (after confirming a sane refund policy in case the region goes pear-shaped in the meantime). My rabbi recommended this program a few years ago and I've been eying it every year, and this year the stars aligned (dates, interesting topic, timely responses to email queries). It sounds like a great experience and I'm excited to finally be going.

I'm also kind of nervous -- not about the program, and not about the Iran thing (I can always bail), but rather about being a solo international traveler. This will only be my second time off the continent and the first time I went with a tour group so I didn't have to personally arrange anything, and somebody was steering us in useful directions. Those of you who've done this "foreign travel" thing, this is your enthusiatic invitation to tell me anything you think I ought to know, no matter how big or small.

Whee! Eeek!

Questions from Zahava over on Blogger.

( Read more... )

I know I owe questions to some people. I'm not ignoring you.

( Read more... )

Tuesday we went to the aquarium in Eilat. One of the key exhibits is the underwater observatory; they've bult a sizable complex under water so instead of putting the fish in tanks, you effectively put the people in the tank. It was pretty nifty. I had mixed results photographically. (I experimented with both regular and "night" settings on the camera, of course disabling the flash for all of it.)

We had to check out of the hotel before going but we didn't leave for the airport until after 4:00, which posed a bit of a problem. Fortunately for us, one family in our group planned to stay an extra day in Eilat and then head to Petra, and they had had a difficulty wiht the hotel that resulted in them being given a suite, so they offered to store our luggage for those few hours. The tour organizers couldn't have anticipated that, of course, and I think this timing was the one bit of bad planning in this trip. The norm, I suppose, is to check bags at the hotel desk, but there are two problems there: first, our guide told us that just a few days earlier he'd heard from another guide that airport security was searching all such bags (that counting as a bag being "out of your control"), which would have been time-consuming, and second, it's not clear the hotel was prepared to store 22 peoples' worth of bags from a two-week trip.

The family with the suite also had a large balcony and they were willing hosts, so lots of us hung around there for the hour or two before it was time to go. Then it was time to load up a bus to drive approximately across the street to the Eilat airport. (It's tiny; I wouldn't have noticed its presence if we hadn't used it.)
( getting home was not so straightforward )

My rabbi has started to talk about a possible trip (probably in 2009) for people who've already been to Israel at least once. I could go for that! I wonder if Dani would join us; part of why he didn't this time is that he's seen most of this stuff before.

(I would be especially interested in any future trip that is explicit about being high-paced and makes no apologies and few concessions. I doubt that will happen, though.)