First few days in Tel Aviv

Here’s a business trip to Israel! I flew on El Al airline (which means To God in Hebrew) and took Business class for the first time. Prior to the trip, I had to get a letter of invitation, and was interviewed with questions on the nature of my stay.

Never been on business class, so it was nice to get the extra leg room for an international flight…

Here were the seat adjustment controls…

Despite the controls showing that you can recline, it wasn’t completely flat, unfortunately…

After about 13-14 hours, we arrived in Israel airport.

Overall Israel reminded me a little more of Taiwan than the States…

with older, concrete houses and people hanging clothes out of their windows.

I did get to stay at a very nice hotel…

View from my floor…

Definitely not used to seeing Hebrew signs everywhere. Here the first language is Hebrew, followed by Arabic, then Russian (apparently lots of Russian Jew immigrations), and then English. That said, just about everyone spoke English here at Tel Aviv, the happening city in Israel.

Interesting that for the parking floors, instead of P1 and P2, they go negative…

Here’s a picture of the recycle bin…

And here’s a coca-cola store, oh no, wait, that’s a post office!

Here’s an interesting decor, though I have no idea what this is…

Unfornately, there were graffitis everywhere…

Also saw an interesting balcony…

Check out this parking job. Wonder how he’s planning to get out…

This is the dinner place we went to. Check out the number of people dining… and the first thing they asked us was, “Do you have a reservation?”

Turns out that Israelis have a big dinner, and most people eat at home at night, when dinner prices could double or more.

Unfortunately this place didn’t really have Israeli food, so I just got a seafood dish…

The hotel was right by the Mediterranean Sea…

And a little further south from Tel Aviv was a city called Jaffa, where there’s supposely eateries for workers that serve only one or two dishes.

Back at the hotel, there were some Orthodox Jews. They’re hard to detect… see if you can find them.

So a Jewish friend taught me that Toda is thank you, Bevakasaha means Please, Sliha means Sorry, and… how do you think people greet each other? Shalom?

They say “hi”.

When it comes to holidays, it’s interesting. Apparently there’s some holocaust observation holiday today (Wed), so most restaurants close in observance of it. We had to eat at the hotel.

Now their Passover is interesting, where you work half day for an entire week. Here in Israel the holidays, including Shabbat (Sabbath), starts around 6pm the day before and ends 7pm the day of. So they typically get half a day the day before as well… though that poses an issue this weekend, where everything closes down by 6pm the day before and the entire day on Saturday. Guess the sightseeing this weekend will be much shorter than expected!

And I’ll have to work on Sunday. Ugh!

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