International travel

Three of us travelling together flew out of Manila on PAL for the short (< 2 hrs) trip to Hong Kong. The huge terminal there reminded me very much of Singapore. I expected to see the jungle of high-rise buildings all around outside the terminal windows, but was surprised to see green hills all around behind them!

We were escorted to the El Al transfer desk where we faced individual interviews. They wanted to know why we were going to Israel and what we were going to do there. My interviewer started straight off speaking to me in Hebrew and it's happened to me over and over again since, so I must look like an Israeli. Sometimes it's a bit of a nuisance (because I have to ask them to start over again in English) but it's a great way to get exposure to the language and to demonstrate the couple of sentences that I can speak. :-)

I spent much of the waiting time learning Hebrew and found a guy just sitting (others were reading or playing guitar or talking with friends) and was able to solicit some new questions (like What are you doing?) so that I could start memorizing them. I was very encouraged to be able to pick out some words from Hebrew conversations I overhead.


I wasn't too surprised at boarding time when a security alert popped up. But it seemed to be only that I had packed my camera cable and some batteries in the same plastic bag as my alarm clock so they wanted to check me out on that. They had been through all the checked-in luggage including my toilet bag. I guess they have to be very careful.

The flight seemed very long--twelve hours from Hong Kong to Tel Aviv even though you're only moving through five time zones. We only really understood this later looking at our route on the map displayed in the plane--for political reasons a lot of time is spent flying around in a big circle to avoid countries that presumably don't allow Israeli planes overhead.

I read that the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv had been closed for a while on Wednesday due to interference from a Palestinian pirate radio station but it must have been sorted out by time we arrived Friday morning.

So we landed safely around 3:30am local time, and sat in the airport until it started getting light as we didn't want to travel in the dark without being able to enjoy the view. The two ladies then went on to Jerusalem, while I bussed to Jaffa (right next to Tel Aviv) where I had a great day, but I need some sleep so I'll write about that tomorrow.