First night in Israel

First of all, here's the combined video remote/game controller/phone/plane services thing from the plane:

Pretty awesome, huh?

Now I'm in the apartment. Getting to this point was rather difficult, because I spent hours in the airport looking for the mythical Arrival Gate 26, which doesn't actually exist. Once I met up with some other dudes from the program, we got together and asked at the information desk. They informed us that, indeed, it does not exist, and pointed us to gate 24, where we met the rest of the people from the program. We ended up having to wait for quite some time, but eventually we got on the bus. The person who was so late ended up sitting with me on the bus, and we had a good conversation.

The apartments are cool, but a lot more bare and unorganized than I expected. But I got unpacked, met my apartmentmates, and now we're going to do some last-minute food-getting. There isn't much in the area, but there's a supermarket and a gas station, so we should be able to at least get something for the hike tomorrow and whatnot.

It's going to be a crazy trip; two days of hiking, and one of the hikes is three and a half hours long. Hopefully I'll manage.