Lift Off

I write these lines in the plane to Milano and by the time they’re on the blog us four seniors will be in our hotel in a small town called Varese north west of Milan.  Our journey started at 11:30 in Ramat Golda with a send-off from Yoav, a growing Shiri and Nika. First stop was Elisha Towers to pick up Albert and then Lilly from Maon Re’ut.  Lilly forgot her spectacles in the room but realised it when the taxi had driven off so by  the time we had resolved that we were running 8 minutes behind schedule and Albert was shaking his head. Another small delay on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway when another driver hailed us down and told us that he had seen a blue plastic bag fly out one of the suitcases on the car’s roof.  Irit started speed-walking back along the highway while the taxi driver drove at least 1 km in reverse! But we could find nothing and moved on.  Our taxi-driver Hanan, an Arab (actually a Bedouin) from the village of Ibtin near Haifa was pleased to hear our stories from Dubai and Oman and my stories from Cairo.  Being an Arab (that’s the way racial profiling goes in Israel) he was pulled over by the security people at the entrance to Ben Gurion airport but the check was soon over. Since we Jews are never pulled over (and Arabs almost always are) Irit and I felt more disturbed by this than Hanan, who is obviously used to it.

 

In spite of all these little delays we arrived at the still new and shiny Terminal 3 building of Ben Gurion airport exactly at the time I had fixed with Daphnie to meet us. In spite of my otherwise precise preparations, I had forgotten to print out our electronic tickets. It turns out, however, in this electronic age, the paper copy is just for the psychological comfort of the passenger – the airline doesn’t need it one bit.  We had 7 suitcases weighing a total of 120 kilos – we had decided to take the girls’ suitcases with us so to save them time in their potentially tight transfer tomorrow. Alitalia wanted to charge us 20 kilos overweight (instead of 40) but the diplomat Irit charmed them into letting us off with a caution.  By now we were aware that our flight would be almost 2 hours delayed and that we wouldn’t get anything to eat on the plane till dinnertime. So, with time to kill and stomachs to fill, we waddled along through passport control and the duty free fountain to the less than glorious food court. Since Israel is a very religious country and the food suppliers want to be able to supply their Orthodox Jewish customers, many of the food stalls were closed and the only one open – Macdonald’s did burgers but no fries and various other concessions to Orthodox Judaism.  But some of our group – Savta (grandma) Lilly - have survived the Holocaust and others have the Holocaust in their bones so finding food on a Shabbat in Terminal 3 was not ultimately an insurmountable task.  After the obligatory window shopping in the so-called duty free shops we waddled along to the departure gate and were seated in the plane by 17:30. We were mentally prepared for take off when the captain shared his woes with us about air traffic congestion over Europe and told us we would have another hour to wait. In practice it was less and we’re due to land at Milano’s Malpensa airport at 20:45 local time. I’ve booked a car from Hertz and we’ll be staying the night in the nicest hotel (with atmosphere) that I could find in a 25 km radius from the airport, in a small town called Varese.