Up Up and Away

Finally. We're on the airplane - our home for the next 10 1/2 hours. We walk past the first class seats and the business seats, but Papa and Nayna keep going. Rats! I was hoping for those seats. They look comfortable. And then, the next to the last row, Papa points to our seats in the middle of the plane. We're in the back. Nayna shoves her backpack under her seat and settles in. Papa examines his seat and finds that the earphone plug is broken. He could watch movies on the seat screen, but he wouldn't be able to hear anything. He tells an attendant, who calls in a maintenance man. Nope! It can't be fixed before we take off. "Oh well," he says. But then the attendant returns and asks us to follow her. She's found two seats a few rows up. Everything works. Papa and Nayna collect all their things. It's noisy with all the people talking.
We all settle in again and prepare for takeoff.
We're on our waaaaay.
The big plane lumbers and rocks down the runway and then heaves up into the air. We're going to Israel!
It was late, after midnight when we got into the air. After we reached our flying altitude, we were served our dinner. I've never eaten so late. But I guess my body clock is going to be all wonky for quite awhile. I crawled back into Nayna's purse and did what any self respecting bear would do...I hibernated. I needed my sleep!

We landed at 5pm Israel time. When the plane touched down, everyone clapped. It was cool. 

After we left the plane, we walked a long way to passport control. Now, we stood in a long line and waited for the lady in the booth to call us. She asked where we were going, looked at the passport pictures and then at  Papa and Nayna and stamped their passports. I stayed in Nayna's purse the whole time and peeked out. It was a little scary for me.

 After all that, we collected our suitcases and went outside to get a taxi for our ride to Tel Aviv and our hotel. Strange! People were all speaking another language. Hebrew. I didn't understand anything they said. And when I looked at all the signs, everything was in Hebrew and under that in smaller letters, English and Arabic. This is going to be interesting!
And the weather was different too. It was very warm and very humid. I'm wearing my fur coat.

 We got to our hotel and unpacked a little. We were hungry again. Nayna said we could take a sherut - a 12 passenger van (I'll tell you about those in another blog) to Frishman Street a few miles away, and eat dinner at a place called Cafe Masada. It's right across the street from the Mediterranean Sea. We sat outside. Nayna and I ate chicken schnitzel and rice. We had so much food, we took some back to the hotel. On our way back to the sherut, we stopped at a little shop and Nayna bought a star of David necklace and we used shekels instead of dollars. That's another thing I need to learn about if I'm going to do some serious shopping.

We got back to our room around 10pm, and although I snoozed through the whole trip, I was really tired and found my comfy bed.
Tomorrow is our first full day in Israel. I wonder what we're going to do.
Laila tov. That means, good night in Hebrew.