The Arrival

Vol: 1 Issue: 1

Well, after months of waiting and wondering, I have finally arrived in Israel.  I left for "The Holy Land" Saturday morning flying a cheap Russian airline Transaero.  The flight was, by far, not as bad as I imagined it being.  When my first flight was late arriving in Moscow (where the connection to Tel Aviv was) the airline put me on the next available flight, which was only an hour and a half away.  Except,  for some reason, either no one who works in the airport speaks English, or they don't care to speak it.  I felt like I was in the movie Soul Plane—unbelievably terrible movie, I only saw it once—where someone is waiting in line at the terminal, and there is an airline worker typing vigorously at a screen the passenger can't see, and then when the camera comes around it shows the worker is playing some computer game. (I tried to find the clip from Youtube, but alas to no avail).  So while I stood at the desk for an hour and a half while the airline worker typed away, wrote Russian in a ledger, and frequently picked up the phone to make calls in Russian, without ever once acknowledging my presence, or any time frame, I became skeptical that she actually was planning on helping.  However, after an old Israeli man who found himself in the same predicament hounded her, she continued to type away and finally produced my ticket.  I made the plane just as it was boarding.

I arrived in Israel around six hours ago.  I am now in my apartment, which is in an amazing part of Jerusalem.  The city has such an old feeling to it, and from where I'm living everything looks like it's out of a sword-and-sandal film.  Here, there will be a total of seven of us, we are living in one large apartment, with a living room, bathroom, kitchen, and three bedrooms that are each fairly large and can fit multiple beds.  Everyone is different.  Interestingly, the underlying goal of this internship is coexistence,  and I think the next two months in this apartment will be an interesting first-hand coexistence experience.  In this reality show mix there is: a Modern Orthodox undergraduate, a French/American graduate student, an Israeli graduate student, a Pakistani undergraduate, an American graduate, a Palestinian undergraduate, and of course, me.

I just explored the local area a bit, and had my first meal: shawarma.  Now I'm going to launch this blog, and then finish some CITI test in order to properly conduct research.  Tomorrow we leave for Haifa early in the morning, and will have a day of meetings and seminars about research and interviewing.  In the next ten days we will be having a full orientation of the region, and for proper interviewing techniques.

I haven't slept in nearly 24 hours, so excuse the dryness of my first post.  There's not much to share yet, but as things get rolling I'll post more about what I'm doing, what I'm seeing, and what I hope to do.  I wanted to have my first post at the beginning so it can be like a trail marker, something to help guide my thought processes.  I'm here until August 11th, and I'm excited to see how the next two months play out, and what opportunities I'm presented with.