April 3-4

April 3-4

            Our journey to Israel was tiring and long, trying and testing.  It’s amazing what God will do to initiate serious character growth within His children.  In my experience, He is much more concerned with making us more like Christ than He is with blessing us materially, which is actually far more blessed than any material thing, since it is eternally profitable. 

            After spending the previous night worrying about our big day of traveling, God showed me yet again how silly my fretting is by providing for us in a miraculous way.  Some friends of the lady we stayed with in Bodrum arrived at the house yesterday evening.  Turns out, one of them is from Istanbul.  Also turns out, she is on the same 8:00 am flight to Istanbul that we’re on.  So, instead of taking an expensive taxi we caught a ride with her to the airport.  We zoomed out, arrived in Istanbul.  Instead of wandering confusedly trying to find a bus to take us across the city to the airport of our departure to Tel-Aviv, she immediately helped us find the right bus.  We made it to Ataturk airport on the European side hassle-free.  We waited for a little bit, then caught our flight to Athens, Greece.  We had a five-hour layover in Athens.  We left the airport and ambled down the side of the freeway to a shopping complex that included an Ikea and a Shell gas station.  We took pictures beside a couple Greek flags flying in the parking lot to document our ‘official’ visit.  Can we say we’ve been to Greece?

            Left for Tel-Aviv.  I can now formally declare my aversion to flying.  It’s cramped and uncomfortable and stuffy and lately, every time the plane lands I’ve experienced this awful, painful sensation in which my head feels like it’s going to burst.  It usually persists for about the last 15 minutes of the flight during the gradual descent.  My eyeballs feel like they’re going to rupture and my head feels like it’s going to explode.  It’s not fun.

            Arrived in Tel-Aviv.  Spent five hours in the airport waiting to catch the 5:16 am train to Hahagana Station near the Door of Hope Shelter for street women and prostitutes – our first stop in Israel.  It felt like an endless wait.  It’s amazing where and when you can fall asleep when you’re tired enough.  During our wait I slumped into sleep in my lap!  Hunched over, I put my head in my hands and plummeted into an agitated sleep.  When I woke up I wiped the drool off my hands and groggily rubbed my eyes and simultaneously decided I also don’t really care for traveling.  I like seeing new places and experiencing new cultures but I don’t really like the whole process of traveling (moving from place to place).  It’s exhausting and it really throws your whole system out of whack.  Also not fun.

            Our American friend who runs the shelter met us at Hahagana Station.  We walked ten minutes from the station to the shelter through one of the roughest looking neighborhoods I’ve ever seen.  Plastic bags and glass and raggedy clothes littered the streets.  Garbage everywhere.  Grungy Graffiti sprayed on dilapidated buildings.  We shuffled exhaustedly down a side street and into a dark and foreboding alleyway.  Our American friend David opened a thick, rusted, creaky metal door and led us down a flight of stairs to a dungeon-like bomb-shelter kind of space/hole in the ground.  He showed us the main room where all the beds are.  This is where prostitutes and street women come to rest.  It’s only open during the day because of a shortage of volunteers, so we had a few hours to sleep.  We settled in to our unkempt beds and attempted to sleep.

And so begins the process of character growth I mentioned previously.  First of all, we both felt sick from lack of sleep.  Second of all, the shelter is really quite filthy, though I’m sure they do the best they can with the resources and volunteers they have.  Thirdly, there were ferocious unrelenting mosquitoes buzzing around on the hunt for blood all over the shelter.  I literally had to cover my whole body in order to escape their fury.  Even my head and part of my face I wrapped in my blanket, and the expert hunters in the pack still managed to find me!  So yeah, I was engaged in mortal combat with pitiless, unyielding mosquitoes until I finally fell headlong into another troubled sleep. 

We woke up at 8:30 and moved into another room with a pullout bed before the girls would start to arrive at about 10:00.  We slept till 11:30 in our designated murky cell, woke up, and decided to make a run for it.  We stumbled clumsily up the stairs and into the light.  In spite of our sluggishness we survived the morning and also managed to escape.

We explored Tel-Aviv.  It’s sort of like Israel’s New York City – very urbane, very cultured, very artistic, very modern, very liberal.  Can’t say it’s my favorite place though, even though my experience of it was tainted by our morning at the shelter and also by my jet-lag sickness, which included a pounding headache that didn’t seem to want to go away.  We walked to the water and sat on the beach for quite some time.  We were in the no-swimming section so it wasn’t quite as crowded but we also moseyed over to the swimming section, which was packed with people on beach chairs lounging under umbrellas.  Anyways, our first glimpse of the Mediterranean was a certainly a welcome one.  There seems to be an outline of sparkling azure all along the coasts wherever you go in this part of the world.  Beautiful!

Tried our first falafel – delicious!  Then we unenthusiastically proceeded back to the shelter before dusk and settled into bed.  Surprisingly we slept quite well, despite the fact that I caught my first sight of a few cockroaches before bedtime.  Going to have to get used to those – yuck!