On the Road Again
It's been a busy couple of weeks around here. Our apartment has basically been serving as a refugee bed & breakfast; one friend getting ready to head to the states via Haifa, two other friends leaving their program in Damascus under pressure from their university, a dozen odd Whiffenpoofs at the end of a three-month tour.
Once the Whiffs arrived I had to get out of town. I was originally supposed to be heading to Lebanon to visit friends in Beirut, but obviously the current war put the kibosh on that plan. But instead of compelling me to leave the region, the war pulled me deeper into the conflict. Angry and frustrated at the borders that seemed to be closing in around me, I decided that I couldn't waste any more time. I needed to start seeing as many places as I could before, God forbid, anything else happened to keep me out.
So, I headed to one of the places on my most endangered list that I could also still get into without too much advance work. On the morning of August 3rd, I bought a round-trip ticket on El-Al airlines for that evening's flight to Tel Aviv, Israel.
The next few posts, I will try to recount some of the (mis-)adventures of my one week trip. It's also a chance for me to try to sort through everything I experienced during that time. While I'm glad that I went, it was on the whole a far from uplifting experience that left me with little hope, I'm afraid, for the current situation.
Once the Whiffs arrived I had to get out of town. I was originally supposed to be heading to Lebanon to visit friends in Beirut, but obviously the current war put the kibosh on that plan. But instead of compelling me to leave the region, the war pulled me deeper into the conflict. Angry and frustrated at the borders that seemed to be closing in around me, I decided that I couldn't waste any more time. I needed to start seeing as many places as I could before, God forbid, anything else happened to keep me out.
So, I headed to one of the places on my most endangered list that I could also still get into without too much advance work. On the morning of August 3rd, I bought a round-trip ticket on El-Al airlines for that evening's flight to Tel Aviv, Israel.
The next few posts, I will try to recount some of the (mis-)adventures of my one week trip. It's also a chance for me to try to sort through everything I experienced during that time. While I'm glad that I went, it was on the whole a far from uplifting experience that left me with little hope, I'm afraid, for the current situation.
