03 July 2007 -- The Unlikely Adventure Begins

I boarded the planes yesterday -- first from Houston to New York, then New York to Tel Aviv. While the El Al ground crew lived up to its reputation of brusqueness, I found the flight itself to be as pleasant as could be expected of ten hours in coach. The passengers were a mixed bunch: tourists and secular Israelis and haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews). The latter group performed its morning prayer ritual on the plane, complete with tefillin (square leather boxes worn on the forehead and arm). I suppose I should have expected this, but it was remarkable in the context of the banalities of trans-Atlantic flight. While tank-topped teen tourists watched Everybody Loves Raymond reruns on their seat-back monitors, black-clad haredim quietly chanted their prayers in the next row. If I were given to cliché, I might make a comment about how the airplane's cabin was a microcosm of Israeli society. But, of course, I'm not even remotely given to cliché...

Since I am making aliyah -- in other words, officially immigrating to Israel -- my entry dance at the airport was more complicated than the norm. Someone from the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel was supposed to meet me at the top of the jetway, but s/he wasn't there, so I just tried to look confident as I proceeded to Passport Control. The stern agent in the booth at the end of a very long line told me to sit in a certain room and wait. I did so. I was there just long enough to start wondering whether I had the right documents in the right place, but then a man walked in and called out, "Aliyah?" As soon as I realized that he was asking for me and not the deceased R&B singer, I followed him into the bowels of Ben Gurion International Airport.

A banner in the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption office reads, "Welcome Home" in several languages. It was homey enough, I guess. I had my first Israeli food (supermarket-bought rugelach) and, after the exchange and explanation of several pieces of ultimately sufficient documentation, I received my teudat oleh (immigrant certificate). I'm official...kind of.

My new status got me a free taxi ride to my hotel in Haifa. Despite my weariness, I tried to pay attention to everything that passed by the window -- and I tried to ignore my driver, with his two cell phones and his smoking habit that no prohibitive dashboard sign was going to repress. We passed through the outskirts of Tel Aviv (Israel's largest metropolis), which were unremarkable in that they looked like the outskirts of many American cities. Besides the trilingual street signs (Hebrew/Arabic/English), the initial stretch of highway could have been in the suburbs of Houston.

When the road moved westward, though, things became interesting. My first glimpse of the Mediterranean Sea was special because I realized it would soon be a routine view. I LIVE HERE NOW! The entrance to Haifa (almost two hours away in pretty heavy traffic) is adorned with an office complex sporting familiar names: Google, Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Israel is supposedly a tech-heavy nation, so this was no surprise. It became immediately apparent as we drove further that Haifa is indeed built on a mountain, as the guidebooks attest. Mount Carmel is not a particularly towering bit of topography, but I still don't look forward to walking up and down its steep and winding streets every day.

[looking toward Haifa Bay from near the top of Mount Carmel]

Haifa is heftier than I'd pictured. This is a big city. It also seems to have an amazing lack of private, stand-alone, single-family houses. Virtually everything I've seen is an apartment building of some kind. Furthermore, whether by statute or by tradition, there is very little in the way of colored paint. The rainbow of Haifa architecture spans from white-ish to off-white to white-with-a-tiny-hint-of-beige. I haven't decided whether that makes it look austerely ancient or monochromatically modern. Hmm...

This is getting long, so I'll close by sharing a comforting moment I experienced during my first stroll of Haifa's streets. Staring at me from the window of a closed shop was none other than the ubiquitous Che. Damn, that man is everywhere. It must be cool to be an international icon -- besides the whole part about having to die first...

[the man, the myth, the sweatshirt -- with his fellow revolutionaries SpongeBob and Dora]