Day 0 in Israel or A Whole Lot of Traveling and Not Much Exciting

I left my house (officially started my trip!) around 8 in the morning to drive to Chicago, where I hopped on a plane to New York, where I hopped off a plane and walked a mile to the worlds biggest coolest building ever, or, the international terminal. The international terminal gets to be the biggest coolest building ever because it’s huge, and because at every moment there’s dozens of different languages being spoken by people from all kinds of different places, which is so cool. I especially enjoyed Lufthansa’s loudspeaker announcements in German and seeing the names of the Arabic airlines because I can kind of understand those ones. 

Eventually the rest of the Birthright group arrived and we got our tickets and lined up to check in. Checking in at El Al, the Israeli airline, is a pretty involved process, because of all the security concerns. Before I headed up to the counter to check my bag I was interviewed by one of the airline workers, who asked all kinds of questions that I did not have the right answers to, such as “Are both of your parents Jewish? What holidays do you celebrate? Do you go to Temple? Do you speak Hebrew? Do you have family in Israel?” and more. The interviewer apparently decided I needed to more carefully inspected, and told me that I should leave my bags with security, to be unpacked and personally examined, and come back in an hour. So me and two other kids who’d been stopped as potential security threats hung around and waited to have our things searched. Everything in all of our bags was fine, and a security guard escorted us through the metal detectors, and all the way on to the plane. 

Nothing much happened after that, I fell asleep on the plane and when I woke up I was halfway around the world in Israel. The airport in Tel Aviv was really pretty and had yellow sandstone walls. I got my luggage, my phone, and loaded myself and my stuff onto our tour bus. An hour later I was asleep in my hotel room in Jerusalem.