במרשמי מ"ה, תהליך זה אורך מספר ימים
One of the things I did during my three-month blog hiatus was to make a two-week trip to Israel. The trip was enormously fun and the Israelis were surprisingly warm and open. I say surprising because my previous extensive interaction with them was through dealing with camera salesmen in Brooklyn, and I now realize that they were a special breed of their own and it was utterly unfair to judge an entire nation and people by their actions. It would be like saying that all New Yorkers behave like their taxi drivers, which is not true. Maybe a bit true, but not entirely.

The other surprising thing is that this is a country constantly surrounded by old wars and new conflicts, and I was expecting that most people would be reserved and suspicious of strangers. But, I found that everyone was uniformly welcoming and friendly. In this case, not unlike the New Yorkers.

But this post is not about Israel, but about my flights there and back. The trip over was on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv. Most of the passengers were Israelis going home (perhaps they came over to buy cameras too). For 13 hours, I felt like I was getting an early introduction to the country, except that no one offered me a very special deal on an excellent Nikon, very cheap, “just for you my friend.” But everyone spoke in Hebrew, argued in Hebrew, sang in Hebrew and read stories to their kids in Hebrew.

Even many of the flight announcements were in Hebrew. Since this was an international flight, the flight attendants would speak first in English, then repeat presumably the same thing in Hebrew. Except that the English part would be one sentence short, and the Hebrew announcement was several minutes long each time, and that made me very nervous. I was wondering, what was it they were telling the other passengers that they were not telling me?

The same thing happened the last time I visited Japan when I took the bullet train. They were also telling the natives a lot more than they were telling us foreigners. Sure we knew that the next stop was Hamamatsu, but was everyone getting a refund on their train tickets, or were they having a buy-one get-one-free sushi sale in the dining car? The only consolation was that most of the Japanese seemed totally uninterested and just sat there slurping their noodles, so I knew I wasn’t missing out on anything much. A friend later told me that the announcer was simply reminding passengers to not forget their umbrellas on rainy days, and telling them that the exit at the next stop would be on the right side or left side. And you’d want to know that well in advance, because each stop was only for a few nano seconds (it’s a bullet train, remember?) and if you hesitated, you’d be off for another hundred miles. No wonder I met so many foreigners on Japanese trains – they just didn’t know how to get off.

But, I digress. Unlike the Japanese on the bullet trains, the Israelis on the Delta flight were very alert and paid close attention to the announcements. And many of my neighbors often got up and went to the first class section for long periods of time, and came back smiling and refreshed. I imagined there was an open bar in the front, and I was not invited. And it was no bar Mitzvah either, although apparently many gifts were exchanged. For the rest of the flight I just sat there feeling sorry for myself, probably the only unhappy passenger on the plane while everyone else had a grand party.

They also celebrated when the plane landed, with a big round of applause for the pilots, the flight attendants and each other, happy with the free drinks or the excellent camera deals everyone got. I remember one time the pilot getting congratulated after an unusually turbulent flight to Denver on a stormy day. But this time the flight was completely smooth and uneventful, so I didn’t know what was the big deal. Certainly nobody applauded on the return flight when we landed. Maybe that had to do with the fact that we came back to Atlanta, but still. At least nobody got out to kiss the ground or scoop up a bag of dirt for souvenir. And that’s another way where the Israelis are very different from the Pope.

And speaking of the Pope, Merry Christmas everybody, and Happy Hanukkah to you Delta fliers.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 12:15 PM