Welcome to the Middle East

Viktor accompanied me to the airport in the morning so that I could catch my flight to Tel Aviv. I made conversation with a lovely Israeli family on the plane and killed the 3,5h flight time like this, as well as with generic love songs and some sleep since Vik and me stayed awake throughout my last night in Austria and I felt completely destroyed. We landed 25 minutes early and I finally realized that I had indeed for the first time in my life travelled to the Middle East. That was huge. Almost like discovering a new continent, I stepped foot onto an entirely different part of this world for the first time. And I had no idea what to expect from this experience, all that was stuck in my mind were the countless warnings I'd received about coming to Israel in the first place. At Ben Gurion, the first thing I noticed was that it was incredibly HOT. Like, not Austrian summer hot, but "holy fuck I'm in the Middle East" hot. I had no idea how I was supposed to survive this weather while walking around and exploring, but it bothered me less than I would have expected. I've always loved the heat, so I could actually handle this despite wearing… "modest" clothing that covered up most of my body. Even the vegetation looked completely different, there were palm trees lining each street. There was Hebrew writing everywhere which was about as foreign to me as the entire rest of it. The passport control, which everyone had warned me about, took approximately 20 seconds so I didn't even get my passport stamped and was free to simply walk through the border control. Since I arrived on Shabbat, there were no trains or buses running from the airport to the city so I had to get onto a taxi. I was warned beforehand about Arab taxi drivers in Israel so I wasn't that much looking forward to this part of the journey. However, Siko, my taxi driver, was very lovely and drove me to a store where I was able to buy a SIM card even on Saturday and afterwards gave me his number since we planned on maybe going out to a pub together after his shift. I arrived at my hostel where I took a short break to charge my phone before heading out to explore Yafo. I started by going to the Great Synagoge before heading all the way down to Jaffa Port. From there, I walked along the beach to meet with some people from the hostel to go swimming. The water had an amazing temperature and the waves were incredible. This beach was perfect for Corgi and me to go surfing the next day. We sat down on the sand with some beer and wine and hung out until a beautiful golden sun set above the sea. Then we walked back to the hostel to get ready for my first experience of the bustling nightlife of Tel Aviv. We decided to go on a pub crawl, however, since I hadn't eaten anything yet we went to get some Israeli food, fried meat and hummus in a bowl with fresh bread. Afterwards, we ran into our friends from the hostel and went to two different bars together. In the second one, I started talking to a guy from Maryland and the two of us decided to go back to the hostel for some beer and chill conversation until I eventually passed out in the hostel bar from being exhausted.Read more