Recently in Travel Category

Perhaps I should stay home more.

The woman I sat next to on the plane to Tel Aviv lived and worked in Haifa, where the explosion occurred. She was flying home after training Qualcomm employees in San Diego and was looking forward to seeing her two kids. She gave me a business card (which I subsequently lost in the hotel room) and suggested I call if I needed a tour guide of Haifa. Hope you and yours are okay.

*yawn*

Forgot to post this last night - blame the rich food and wine (see below).

Okay, I think I've beaten jet lag so far. That said, I woke up at 5:30 AM and couldn't go back to sleep, so I caught up on the news and prepped for the day's meetings. I didn't mention the free breakfast - it's pretty spectacular, with quite a bit of fresh seafood and fresh-squeezed orange juice to die for. If I lok ever so slightly yellow-tinged when I return, it's not jaundice, I promise.

Meetings went well - these guys get lunch brought in every day, which is impressive. However, they also get to pick what they want every day from selection of local restaurants - they have a web application where they choose, and another that tells them when the food arrives. How cool is that? I had Hummus and Shourma (local spellings), and yea, it was good. Brian had the spaghetti - clearly he's not human, as that quantity of pasta would knock a normal man into a carbo coma from which nothing could return. A semolina event horizon, if you will.

After the day's meetings wrapped up, we headed out to a local restaurant on the beach with several of our new friends. Gilly's(Over_$30)/Gilly%11s_20060223310/ is a 'meat' restaurant, according to our hosts. It was pretty similar to an American nouvelle cuisine restaurant, with sa variety of meat and seafood. We had some fantastic calamari, and I had the Yehudale - a meat-in-cream-sauce dish for which the restaurant was particularly known. Some lovely Chilean wine rounded out the main course. Dessert was a flourless fudge cake with cardamom ice cream and a small creme brulée.

Dinner's conversation was wide ranging - Ilya, a russian immigrant from Kyrgystan (I won 'guess the republic' on the first try - even knew where it was in relationship to China and Tajikistan) and I had some great discussions on Cold War opinions of each other's countries, the difficulty of being a non-traditional Jew in a Jewish state, etc. etc. No one seemed to shy away from difficult topics - 'Political Correctness' gets very little mileage here. Refreshing, actually.

That's all for today - I'll update tomorrow night before the flight if I can.

Before anyone asks, no, I don't count yesterday as a day in Israel. I got to the hotel and went to sleep. If I'd managed to eat something, or maybe watch some TV, I might consider it a half day - but I didn't so I don't. So today was the real Day One.

Thanks to my new Battlestar Galactica dvds (Thanks, Jenny!) I stayed awake the entire seventeen hours of the trip, insuring I'd be exhausted by the time I got in. I woke up this morning a bit tired, but no signs of jet lag thus far. Fingers crossed. Then again, it probably won't really set in until I leave Wednesday night. Fun. I've also decided that this will be my last transatlantic flight in coach if there's any way to avoid it. Cramped would be an understatement. Oh, and they've taken away my sole consolation at ocean-hopping on the cheap - no free booze! Cheap bastards.

Tel Aviv is best described as the Amsterdam of the Middle East. It's clean, quiet and very cosmopolitan. It shares some architectural similarities with Egypt, but when there's no large sign or billboard covered in Hebrew I can pretend I'm in San Diego or one of the less stucco-hell beach suburbs of Orange County. I don't mean this to sound negative in any way - it's actually a very charming city. Everyone is incredibly friendly - I sat next to people from Tel Aviv on both legs of my flight, both of whom gave me ideas on where to go and what to see.

The meetings I flew over for have gone well so far - there are a few technical issues that have cropped up, but nothing insurmountable. Everyone I've met has been super nice - we went out for dinner and drinks with Gilad and Keren after the day was done. We went to a lovely bar/restaurant right on the beach named Mike's Place (Site seems down at the moment). After dinner, our hosts told us the place had been bombed in a terrorist attact three years ago. Whee!

So, to sum up: Tel Aviv is a fun, lively, modern beach city, with great bars and restaurants that occasionally get bombed. I'm having a blast and am actually sad that I have to leave so soon. With any luck we'll rent a car and drive out to Jerusalem tomorrow night, but we'll see.

Oh yeah, photos. Haven't taken any, but if you can picture one of the nicer parts of an OC beach town you're most of the way there. Just add tall towers here and there. For those of you not familiar with Southern Cal, I'll try to provide photos tomorrow.

If I've seemed a bit uncommunicative lately, I apologize - work has been mighty busy of late. In fact, I'm headed out of the country in support of a new deal. So goodbye, rainy Northern California - hello, Tel Aviv, Israel! I'll be flying out tomorrow for a real Cannonball Run - two full days traveling (17 hours each way) for three days on the ground. I'll try and blog a bit from Israel, but odds are I'll either be too busy or too tired (or both). Oh, and it's supposed to rain the entire time we're there, too. Whee.

I'm a little sad that my first time to Israel is going to be such a short work trip - I doubt I'll even get to see much of Tel Aviv, let alone anything interesting. Tel Aviv is your typical European-style city - very modern. I wish I could get out to Jerusalem for a bit at least...

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, one of the resort cities we stayed in while visiting egypt was hit by three suicide bombers a few days ago. The New York Times has a good writeup on the Egyptian government's position on the attacks and their information thus far. What might not be common knowledge is that we ate dinner at the Ghazala Gardens hotel, one of the targets of the attack.

As those who have read our blog entries and seen our photos (going up real soon now, I promise), Security around tourist destinations in Egypt is very prevalent and remarkably effective for its simplicity (essentially throwing men and guns at the problem). At no time did we feel in any danger, even when wandering down dark streets in the old quarters of Cairo in the middle of the night. Egypt is a friendly, safe place, and incidents like these are saddening because the provide yet another reason for Americans to miss out on a spectacular tourism experience. I must admit, however, that my decision to go to Sharm El-Sheikh might have changed had this happened two weeks before we left, rather than two weeks after. Then again, maybe not.

What I find most disconcerting is reconciling the my memories with the images in the news. In my mind, the charmingly run-down fuul 'n' ta'amiyyah place at which we ate dinner while watching a throng of European tourists pass by now coexists with the pictures everyone has seen on CNN, like trick photography or one of those high school explanations of the nature of matter. I wonder if the musicians we listened to while eating were playing the night the bomb went off.

Okay, enough melancholy. I've got a speech to write and a wedding to attend.

Okay, so we haven't posted the final two entries yet. Technically, they haven't been written yet - they exist in outline form, I promise. Still, we owe you, the reading public, a small amount of prose. Rest assured, it will be our top priority this weekend.

Oh, wait. No it won't. That spot will be taken up by drinking beer and flaking in the Tahoe sunlight. Sorry 'bout that. Actually, come to think of it writing those entries is unlikely to enter the top ten priority list until after the 4th. We thank you for your understanding.

The travel entries will be posted as soon as we catch up on sleep, we promise. In the meantime, we've spent between twenty four and thirty six hours in a row in a row awake, so we're going offline for a bit. Hope y'all understand.