So there we were, Joe and I, about a full day after leaving America, we touched down in the land of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. For me, this was the first time I would venture out of the states into lands that I had only read about in the Bible and in history books. It was all very exciting and was probably part of the reason I had slept for only 30 minutes (if that) in the last 36 hours. We were both exhausted to the point of Christmas Eve childlike nervousness. We couldn’t wait to see all there was to see, all there was to hear and most importantly all there was to eat. Airplane food and airport McDonalds fish sandwiches were all my stomach had left in it, and that was only adding to my anxiousness.
We left LAX and had flown over half the US and Canada to London. At one point while looking out over the icy wilderness and watching the stubborn sun just hanging there waiting for it to set even though it never did, my friend Joe, leans over and says “Dude, if this plane goes down, even if you survive the crash your *** will freeze in that water! No joke man that water is cold!”. This statement amused nobody in the seats behind us or to the sides. All I could do was nod, put my headphones back on and pretend I was asleep. Now no one had warned me that air travel was so cold and here I was wearing sandals, by the time I landed in Heathrow my feet were freezing cold. It was mid July and I had assumed there would be no need for shoes and socks in a desert land and I was right, but halfway over the Atlantic I was wishing I had at least packed some slippers. Heathrow was under some sort of construction and we went through a maze of plywood walls, duty-free shops, restaurants and confusing signs that seemed to point nowhere. Anyway, like I was saying it was mid July 2005, the London bombings had just taken place and security was tight and I am a rather dark fellow during the summer and actually most of the year for that matter, and my friend had warned me to not be surprised if I was taken out of line at an airport to be questioned, which did in fact happen more than once. At each checkpoint I was asked to remove my sandals so they could be swabbed, I’m assuming for bomb-making materials, and this happened at each airport, so in the end I was glad thankful for my choice of foot attire. After getting lost twice at Heathrow and standing at the baggage claim watching everyone else pick up their luggage for an hour before being told that our luggage was already transferred to our connecting flight, we were off to Germany via Lufthansa. An airline that, in my opinion, has awesome food and great service.
Now the airport in Frankfurt looks like something out of a cheesy sci-fi movie or at best a Tomorrowland attraction. By this point the novelty of traveling had expired and we just wanted to be in Israel. The airport seating was impossible to sleep on, even using my bag packed to bursting with camera equipment as a pillow. I had gotten this crazy idea that I was going to use this once in a lifetime opportunity to film a short documentary about Israel, using their pullout of Gaza (about a month away) as a backdrop. This was proving to be a challenge since Joe was not sold on this idea and kept warning me on the various ways I could end up in a Middle Eastern prison rotting, for the rest of my life, missing a limb. After paying $10 for one McDonalds meal and $7 for an ice cream we were a bit concerned about the amount of money that was supposed to last the next two weeks, we were hoping that the exchange rate in the Holy Land was a bit more forgiving than the almighty Euro.
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