After an entire day of travel and transition, I’ve finally begun to settle in to my apartment in Israel.
I arrived at Newark airport at around 9:45am on Wednesday, January, 23. After taking about a half hour to go through El Al security and check my bags, we ended up sitting with the entire group on the floor of Newark. My mom left at that point, and I socialized a bit with people sitting around me. They told us the flight was boarding at 12:30, but the Hebrew University Reps at Newark told us to sit put on the floor. All of a sudden, we were told there was absolutely no reason for us to wait to go through security. It was a surprisingly painless process and I didn’t get asked about anything. They even let me go through the metal detector again after it beeped while I was wearing my fleece. There was a great place to buy some light lunch after security, and then we waited another hour before boarding the plane.
I was seated in a window seat behind the wing. Luckily, the guy on the aisle noticed an open seat in the emergency row. So the guy in the middle moved to the aisle and the middle seat of my row was empty, which was really nice. The group sitting around me was actually part of the few people not with Hebrew University. They were some sort of “denominational group” (read: Christian) visiting the “Holy Land.” They were very pleasant, but not really my sort of people. However I was very amused the entire flight because we had an individual video on demand system, and I was able to watch four movies.
After we deplaned I got through Israeli customs with absolutely no problems. My luggage was almost the last to come off the plane, so that was a little nerve-racking but no big deal. When we got to the busses they discovered that we had so much luggage another bus had to be ordered to fit all of the people and stuff. Once we got to campus people started going to the housing office to get rooms. They told us to get into groups of five (the number of rooms in each apartment) so that we could easily get our rooms. So now we had to scramble to find our roommates for the entire semester based on ten minutes of first impressions. Somehow, I ended up in the last group of people getting rooms. We ended up waiting FOUR hours to even go into the housing office. By that point, they told us five person rooms were no longer available. It was actually a really bad situation because there were a lot of pairs of girls being placed with three Israeli guys already living in apartments. I ended up with these two very nice girls who knew each other from before, named Amanda and Rebecca. Unfortunately, there’s one other international student who was here last semester but isn’t here now. His stuff is everywhere (including the rotting food in the fridge and the Merry Christmas sign on the door). The other person will definitely be a boy we were told, who will be arriving with the rest of the group on Sunday.
We’re trying to switch to be in an apartment of all girls because none of us are really happy. This is especially because we had to fill out housing form right after our acceptances which were completely ignored.
After getting our housing, we waited another 20 minutes to get our keys. We were brought up to our room, and then we went down to get our luggage and dump it in the apartment. Afterward we took a shuttle onto the campus to do our financial and health registration. It’s important at this point to note that when we first arrived on campus they gave us vouchers for free on campus lunch. Of course because we had to wait SO long for housing we still hadn’t had lunch. This is at 2:30pm Israel time, about 10 hours after our airplane breakfast. One of the counselors offered to get a bunch of people food while we waited to complete our forms. He must have arrived after we had proceeded on to computer registration because he had nothing left when we saw him next. At 4:00pm we had an orientation, and we still hadn’t eaten. So he ran to get my apartment mates and one other guy food. When he came back the food turned out to be really good, which was a welcome change from the rest of the day. Then of course we rush back in to the room, only to wait another twenty minutes while falling asleep before the orientation even began.
My lesson from this is definitely that everything in Israel is hurry up and wait. We’re all very excited to move to the next station in line, only to find out there’s another ridiculous wait. Also, nothing starts on time. Perhaps this can be attributed to the more relaxed nature in Israel. But I’m more inclined to blame it on the fact that we’re waiting for 200 Jews to get together in the same room at the same time and focus on the same thing.
After our meeting ended we walked back to the dorms (only about 15 minutes) and tried to get on the internet by using other apartments wireless networks. We were only mildly successful, and will have to wait until Sunday to get a wireless router for our apartment. At 6:30 we all met up to get a free ride to the mall, which of course didn’t leave until 6:45. We had two hours to get sheets, blankets, pillows, and dinner. By the end we were all exhausted and carrying an obscene amount of things through the mall. But it was definitely a successful trip for everyone and I was able to finally go to a cash machine.
Everyone on the trip is really nice and the counselors keep emphasizing that by the end we will be a family. I can kind of see that happening because everyone is really open and nice. I’ve even already had some good interactions with the people that I knew from before the trip but didn’t really know. The funniest thing about meeting people is the insane amount of Jewish (and some non-Jewish) geography which goes on. I’ve already met people from home, from my rival high school, from camp, that know people from college, and many other random connections. I’m really excited to try and settle in and I can’t wait for ulpan to start on Sunday.
