First day!

Hey everyone! I'm writing my first post from my apartment in Ashdod! The past 30 or so hours has been very exhausting. It doesn't really seem like there was an over night; just one long, drawn-out, sweaty day.

My mom brought me to the airport Sunday morning and of course she was sad. But I was, and have been throughout this whole process, "shockingly cavalier," to quote Juno. I thought about the fact that I used to bawl my eyes out in that airport going back to DC after a weekend or a break at home, but here I was, on my way to Israel for 10 months with barely any outward emotion at all. How the times have changed!

First I flew from Cleveland to Toronto. The plane was tiny (9 rows) and dinged up and I wasn't entirely confident we would actually make it to Toronto. But, alas, we did and I had a 6 hour layover there. That was actually quite enjoyable. A lot of my friends downloaded an app so we could text internationally so I was talking to them, playing on my computer, and reading The Game of Thrones on my kindle (I'm not really into it yet, even though I know people kept telling me to just push through the first 100 pages so we shall see).

Then was the big flight. So first, me and somebody else were both assigned the same seat on the plane. This person happened to be travelling with his wife and four children, so they asked me to wait while they tried to find me another seat on the flight that they said was completely full. So that was fun. It ended up fine and I had an aisle a few rows up. But this row was DIRECTLY behind a rampant baby that literally screamed the entire 11 hour flight. After a very flight-y meal of chicken and cous cous, two episodes of Modern Family, and half of (500) Days of Summer, I still could not fall asleep. I eventually did sleep but it was very unrestful due to the screaming child and the sub-zero temperature of the aircraft.

All of a sudden, here I was, landing in Tel Aviv! It was deja vu going through the whole place again and brought me right back to last summer! I took a service and was brought to my apartment in Ashdod. The apartment has a big common room/living room/kitchen area with 8 people living in 4 bedrooms. The bedrooms are teeny tiny, but the view is breathtaking and our balcony is lovely. My roommate isn't here yet (her flight got delayed until tomorrow), but the other people here seem pleasant enough. I'm waiting to pass judgment about them until a further blog post, so I'll keep you on your toes about them.

We all met Irit, our community coordinator, in the common room of the other apartment (there are 16 of us total, 8 in one main apartment and 8 in the other) and went over what the next couple weeks will look like. They seem very busy! I'll write more about them as they come, but I'm excited for them. We're not actually starting to teach until October 10th, but we'll be doing training and ulpan (Hebrew language learning) first. We have a lot of vacation days in September for all the Jewish holidays and people have been talking about travelling to Europe so, if affordable, that would be amazing!

Finally, Irit, a beautiful Israeli woman, took us on a small tour of our neighbordhood-not all of Ashdod, but some shops and markets around us. Then she left us to fend for ourselves. We bought some necessities and then got falafel from an authentic Israeli falafel shop. Just as delicious as I remember them! Now we're all relaxing feeling the cool breeze off the Medditeranean. Quite a day!