Traveling Day
Since I didn’t write on the evening of our arrival, I’m catching up now.
Yesterday was our marathon travel day, or, really, two days. We left Denver around noon on Saturday, flew to Newark, had a 5 hour layover there, and finally boarded our flight to Tel Aviv. Newark to TLV was scheduled to be a 9.5 hour flight, but tail winds bought us an extra hour. Slept for a bit on the plane, but we were pretty beat when we arrived.
As we came in for our landing, I thought about how unpleasant, uncomfortable, and cramped flying has become, and then I thought: you are a spoiled child of the 21st century. Three or four generations back, this trip would have taken weeks or months. It took us less than 24 hours to travel 1/3 the circumference of the Earth. And then the jet lag.
We took the way of the exhausted and affluent traveler, and caught a taxi to our hotel in downtown Tel Aviv. It’s a pleasant place a block from the water, with a comfortable lobby (with free WiFi) and very European-style (read: compact) rooms. We cleaned up from the road, and sat down in the lobby to catch up on email and for the hotel’s afternoon “snack”: coffee, tea, bread, cheese, olives , fruit, and warm croissants filled with chocolate-hazelnut wonderfulness. I am immensely glad that we will be spending a lot of time riding in the coming days, because the food already seems just a wee bit too good and plentiful (more about that later).
After Derek finished his blogging, we took a walk around the neighborhood. It’s not a particularly charming neighborhood–concrete is the dominant aesthetic–but there are a few restaurants and bars, and it’s a block from the water.
At 9, we met up with a local guy I met online when I asked on a message board for restaurant recommendations around here. Dani is a software engineer like us, and we spent a pleasant hour or two chatting over glasses of Guinness at an Irish pub around the corner. And I believe that fully sums up the international character of this city. Nice to make a new friend here in Israel, and I hope he visits Boulder some time, so we can pay him back for the beers.
And then we collapsed.