Arrival

We arrived in Israel on the Nefesh B'Nefesh flight on August 18, 2005. The flight was great. Once in the airport we had to listen to some speeches at 5 in the morning. I wasn't sure why Ehud Olmert was invited as a guest speaker during the week of disengagement from Gaza to a corwd who was mostly made up of religious people, many of whom weren't so fond of Olmert and the Disengagement. Be that as it may, he made some really dumb comments like "If all of you would have come earlier may be we would not be leaving Gaza today", which did got some people really hiped up. People were jumping from their seats, screaming, and I really thought the whole thing might turn ugly. But luckily he stopped speaking and the crowd settled down.

When we took our sherut from the airport to our hotel in Jerusalem (courtesy of Intel) the driver decided to take a short cut and give us a tour of the West Bank. I was never there before, so at first I thought that the fence on both sides of the road was just a fence. Only later I realized that it was a portion of the security fence to prevent the Palestinians to throw rocks at the drivers. We arrived at the Crowne Plaza Jerusalem safe and sound.

The next day many people who were relocated from Gaza arrived in Jerusalem hotels and protestor demonstrations against the Disengagement began right down the street. I had to go to work to get my company car (yey Intel!). I show up at the car office and everything is ready except that the manager does not like the fact that I have my American driver's license and not an Israeli one. I explain to him that by law I have 3 months to get an Israeli one and that I am allowed to drive. They give me the car and I leave. The next day I get a phone call from the car office saying that I have to go the DMV and get an Israeli driver's license or they will have to take the car back. Obviously, all of this is impossible, because I have to wait for at least a week until my information with my Teudat Zehut and Teudat Oleh gets passed into their computer system and then I need to schedule a driving lesson and a test. So I tell the clerk (there is that word again) who calls me on the phone that he needs to explain to his boss that he has no idea what he is talking about. I call NbN, my manager in the US, and complain, beg, cry, but no one can really do anything about this. This story repeated for 2 days. Finally I walk into the car office and start screaming at the car manager that he is full of it and there is no way for me to get an Israeli Driver license right now and that I am not giving him the car back no matter what he says. And suddenly he says, "OK, when ever you get your Israeli license just bring us a copy". And that's it. It's like he wanted me to come and yell at him so he could feel better about his power trip.