El Al is much better...

Shabbat was really nice - Liz, Ronen and I were invited to a meal with Liz's co-workers - so it was chock-full of Answers.com jokes, stories, and of course, answers. There were 16 people altogether, and although some people spoke mostly Hebrew, others spoke mostly French, we were all able to get along and enjoy the Moroccan-influenced food. (She made her own matbucha!)

We had about an hour's walk home, after which we bid each other good night and passed out.
I woke up at about 9, and was mad with my cold for giving me reasons to wake up so early on shabbat. I sat up and read this weird book called, "Still Life with Woodpecker." The guy's writing style was a lot more interesting than the plot, which is pretty impressive considering the plot was about a royal Spanish family who got kicked out and is now living in New York, where their daughter is a environmental-loving, vegetarian, cheerleading, outlaw. Yeah, it's weird.

Liz's friend Shira (who we went to college with but only really became friends with her afterwards) hosted a meal at Liz and Ronen's apartment, and much of the same people from my first shabbat at Liz and Ronen's were there again. Good people, and we had a good meal. Dessert was a really good apple crumb cake, which Ronen likes to call apple crumble - it's an Aussie thing I guess, and a bowl of citrus salad. There were kumquats and little lemon things where you could eat the peels! weird. but good.

By the time everybody from lunch left, shabbat was pretty much over, so I packed up my stuff and chilled out until we thought it was dark enough.

Shabbat was nice, calm, relaxing - pretty much everything after Shabbat wasn't.

I left my rugelach from Marzipan in my freezer in Har Nof, so the plan was to drop off my stuff at the hotel Prima Royale (where the JEC's sheirut was leaving from), take a bus up to Har Nof, pick up my rugelach, and come back down to the hotel by bus with enough time.
Here's what actually happened:

I got a cab to the hotel at around 6:30, get there at around 6:50, put my stuff in a room, and asked the lady worker at the hotel where I can catch an 11 or 15 bus. Apparently the closest way to get there is to take another bus and transfer, so I do. I transfered at one of the stops in Mea She'arim and got on the SLOWEST BUS EVER. He was stopping in-between stops, talking to the passengers, driving at 3 kilometers an hour - it was torture. And then, we get up to Har Nof and the bus starts making an obnoxious beeping sound. He hits a few buttons, nothing changes, so he stops the bus. He turns off the bus and turns it back on, hoping the restart method works for busses as well as it does for computers, and Eureka, it does. We go a few more blocks, somebody hits the "stop request button" and the noise comes back with a vengeance. Argh! He then pulls the bus over, shuts it off for good and tells us all to get out. We are now at the high end of Shaulzon. My apartment is on the low end of Shaulzon. I start walking towards #90, trying to flag down any cab I can find, and nobody's stopping. I see an 11 bus pulling up at the nearest stop (by # 50) and I get on. In my best pitiful pleading voice, I tell him how I was kicked off the other bus and I would just like to go two stops on the bus - can I get on without buying another ticket? He says ok, most likely because he couldn't understand my frantic English, and I thank him a hundred times. I get off at my stop and RUN into the building, where some kid decided to rebuild his bookshelves in the middle of the lobby. I get on the elevator, wishing it to go up first, and of course it doesn't. At this point, it's just about 8:00 and I had to be down at the hotel at 8:15, when the sheirut would be leaving. I go into the apartment, grab my rugelach, say goodbye to my roommate again, and run back downstairs, where the cab I had called was honking away.

I don't know how, but I got there in time. I overpaid the guy about 10 or 15 shekels, but I didn't care - all I cared about was getting on that sheirut so I could get to the airport on time.

This is the other story - remember how my first post was all about the horrors at the airport? Well, yeah, guess what... IsrAir SUCKS. Our direct flight has now been changed to a flight that's stopping in Ireland for an hour. I don't really know why, nor do I think it will only be an hour, but I'm annoyed, to say the least. The idea of being on a plane for 14 hours with a head cold less than thrills me. Who knows, maybe when we stop in Ireland, they'll give us all a good Irish beer. I know I'll need it.

I'm leaving on a jet plane... sort of.

Adventure finds me; I don't even have to leave the airport.
I'm standing in line waiting to be checked in - probably on the longest line I've ever been on in my life (barring the line to "Space Mountain" in Disney World). It's just not moving. I start to make some phone calls, and I'm just talking about my flight that's supposed to leave at 8:10. Two women in front of me say, "Oh, it's been delayed til 9:30." Great. Then they tell me that the flight has been chartered out.

What does that mean? Well, it means that IsrAir doesn't actually have a plane for us. So, they chartered some other airline to fly us to Israel instead.

I finally get up to the check in desk, and the guy tells me that they have to look for a seat for me. Um, isn't that the point of booking a ticket for a certain flight? Like, you buy the ticket for the specific flight so that you have a seat on said flight. He told me that they have to unblock some seats so people can sit on the plane. "Well, our system is a little weird." Weird? Weird is not the word. Stupid, maybe. Clearly, they overbooked. So I was told to wait over by the ropes, and 10 minutes later he handed me a boarding pass that said I would be sitting in seat 12 F.

At this point I was desperately thirsty, so I go buy a bottle of water for the hefty price of $2.70. It's like movie theater prices! I take the best drink of water I've had since that time my first Israel tour had no water in the dessert on our hike.

I walk to the security checkpoint so I can pass through and go to the gate. I totally forgot that you can't take liquids through security and here I am with a $2.70 bottle of water that I JUST bought. I was not throwing this bottle of water out, no way - so I downed the whole thing in about 30 seconds. Yeah, that was fun. Then I went through the whole taking off shoes, putting all electronic things in a bin, walking through the metal detector thing, and finally make it to the other side.
I walk to the gate and see that it is indeed not IsrAir's plane that we are flying on - it's World Airways. I was just hoping "World Airways" was actually going to take us to Tel Aviv, and not to, I dunno, Switzerland. Although, Switzerland would have been fun too - you know, for the mountains and chocolate, and cheese and such.
Anyway, finally, at 9:00, we start to board. Finally.

I get on the plane, and I find that I'm seated in-between two Chassidic men. Oh yeah. Me, wearing pants, sitting in between two chasidic men. It actually wasn't as bad as it could have been. The guy sitting on the outside got up about the same times I needed to use the bathroom, so I didn't have to try and jump over him without touching him. One time he fell asleep, and the chassid sitting on the other side of me saw me in my predicament and laughed - so I asked him to tap the sleeping guy for me - he did. :)

After many cramped legs, and two decently crappy meals, I land in Israel. Like all good Israeli travelers, the first thing I do is turn on my cell phone. This rabbi was supposed to pick me and a few other people up from my flight, but didn't know that the flight had been delayed two hours. So, I tried to call him to let him know that I arrived. I couldn't get through. I tried another number - nothing but some message from Cellcom I didn't totally understand cause it's in Hebrew. Great. Half an hour later, after I get my bag and go through customs, I try again and get through. The rabbi tried calling me, realizing my account hadn't been activated, and activated it for me! He's a nice guy - crazy, but nice.

Eventually, after waiting for two other people, we leave the airport. So, this guy is crazy - he was texting, typing, sending emails, making phone calls, all while driving. He's American, but clearly well acclimated to Israeli culture. After dropping the other two people off, we make a pit stop at the Magen David Adom, which is where he works. Ten minutes later he comes back to the car, and says, "There's an accident right near where we're going! You know what that means..." And I didn't, but apparently it means that we can take out our flashing light, put it on top of the car and drive like a complete maniac. Holy wow, I have never had an experience anything like that before! Thankfully, I am at Liz's apartment, relaxed, calm, with no shock symptoms from crazy Israeli ambulance drivers.