Mediterranean Tour 2007: In-Transit to Tel Aviv

Well, on Saturday morning after a long week of prepping for client meetings and having what I think was a rather successful one, I hopped on a plane to Tel Aviv. My first visit to Israel, a place my darling dad has been promising to take me to since I had my Bat Mitzvah at 13. But better late than never! :)

But before I even get to the details of my first trip to Israel though, I need to share my rather random people encounters before I even landed in the country. I arrived to the airport with plenty of time to get through what I imagined would be rather intense security (which I was right about by the way, I haven't been given the full body wanding going through security at Frankfurt airport until now). After getting through the first metal detector and wanding I was standing at Passport control waiting patiently as the minutes were ticking away (they tend to hold planes for you in Europe once you've checked in and they know you're headed to the gate) when this rather frantic American woman in front of me started started asking the people ahead of her what time their flights were. . . She seemed fairly panicky, and since I was feeling pretty calm I asked her where she was flying and what time her flight was. Turns out she was also on her way to Israel so I calmed her down, told her there would be no problems and we started chatting, although way to through the second security control (and full body wanding), to the gate on the bus to board the airplane.

It turns out that she is a professor of neurobiology at MIT, but wait it gets better. Her name is Ann M. Graybiel and she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2001 by President Bush. She does most of her research on Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's. Fascinating woman. We spent our time in line chatting about travel and studies. The challenges of being a new entry into the academic world (there are no secure jobs anymore) and what it was like for me living in Germany.

This was before I even got on the plane!

Then once I got onto the plane I sat next to a gentleman from the Foreign Service (retired) who had been in Israel in the early 1970s for about two years sweeping for mines. He was back after a career that took him to Singapore, Germany, Mexico and I think somewhere in Easter Europe before he retired to the Southeast coast. Now he was doing some consulting and freelance work to, as he put it, "Pay for the retirement home." He had great stories to tell (and he was greeted personally by a government official once we finally got to passport control in Tel Aviv).

On my other side was an Israeli guy who sounded like he was from somewhere in the Midwest, but was actually living somewhere in Canada. He had originally been from Romania but his parents decided to immigrate to Israel when he was just a child, so he had grown up outside of Tel Aviv and had the full experience (military service before college and all that fun stuff). We spent a fair portion of the 4 hour flight chatting about the fact that he would only speak in Hebrew to his kids. And even better, he quite helpfully provided lots of good places to get falafal and other Middle Eastern food delights. By the time I got off the plane he had completely reassured me that I couldn't be safer in Israel.

All this before I arrived in Tel Aviv, three fascinating people with incredibly different stories to tell. If this is the start, I can't imagine who I might meet next. . . .