“Welcome to Tunisia!” It’s a phrase with at least as many meanings as the word “Aloha” has in Hawaiian. It can be sincere, sarcastic, despondent, jubilant and much more… and all at once. I got up this morning with an ear infection… or maybe that’s just a tumor rumor.  I have a nasty head cold […]

So last night was the start of Shabbat and I guess I didn’t realize how much of an impact that would have on me. My AirBNB hostess warned me as I headed out at 4:30 pm that everything was already closed. I thought Shabbat started at sundown and the sun was still out… albeit setting. […]

I don’t know.  Post casual. The Pre-Race Wait Around: I checked out the marathon route map.  I don’t care if the map isn’t drawn to scale, there really seems to be some missing kilometer markings between 28 and 31… like, I dunno, 29 and 30? Apparently A LOT of us decided to wear the race […]

Last night, while I was held captive on a tour bus seemingly re-routed by Gilligan and Skipper of the SS Minnow (the delay stretching to three hours you see), I received a few email responses from the Tourist Israel about my real-time complaints regarding the FIRST tour I took… and responded with complaints regarding this […]

Having slept five hours, I’m back at the Grand Beach Hotel in Tel Aviv to be picked up for my second day tour by Tourist Israel. After yesterday’s C-/D+ experience I don’t hold out much hope. But perhaps lowered expectations will yield a better time. Here’s today’s itinerary. From my paper voucher however there are […]

A Dead Sea mudbath.  Our Guide said I’d look ten years younger when I was finished.  It was a lie, as were many things the tour company told me today. *** In a 20 passenger minibus, our driver is equal parts stand up comic and New York cabbie. You’d think with a large vehicle he would […]

When George Lucas originally conceived of “The Star Wars” (with that soon-to-be-lost definite article) there were embryonic elements that we all would come to know and love … and there were some marked differences that would be rewritten into the archives as “what might have been.” The plot was much more a translation of Akira […]

A stray thought before I begin: Israel is a nation under constant existential threat, every day, every hour, every minute.  And so it shouldn’t surprise me that there is heightened security wherever I go.  There are security guards outside grocery stores or mall entrances, checking bags and waving a metal detector over each person who […]

It’s been a long, strange trip across the pond.  The opening two hours saw turbulence that made me think on more than one occasion, “Huh… I wonder if this is how it ends – plummeting from 40,000 feet to the ground below.”  Understandably flight attendants were instructed to keep their sears but that meant any […]

And so it begins. It’s 13 hours to Constantinople (a place I’ve never been to before… and this doesn’t really count as I’m not even leaving the airport), then a 2 hour flight to Tel Aviv. Wait… they’ve re-routed me through Istanbul not Constantinople.  Hope that’s okay… More to come but in the meantime…