The Sky at Night

As I was queuing at check-in in Prague, my trip started to take on a true Israeli style; in standard nosey/friendly mode, I got chatting with an Israeli girl and her husband, Tali and Chris. Both PhD students at Edinburgh, they were on their way to Haifa, now that the Hizbullah attacks had stopped, to see Tali's family.

I got into conversation with Chris, a Christian Spaniard, on religion and politics. It was quite bizarre to speak to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, ardent Zionist, who seemed to feel more passionately than I did about the state of Israel's North after the rocket bombardment.

Hundreds upon hundreds of forks of lightning

It's a massively sensitive topic in Israel - Who is a Jew? He's married to one, he loves Israel, and they plan to settle here shortly. He's even casually learning about Judaism. He qualifies under the law of Return to 'make Aliyah' (immigrate), as a relative of a Jew. I expect that this topic will come up again and again in the next few months.

On the plane, two incredible sights befell my eyes. The first was something I happened to see just by a thoughtless glance out of the window. Almost obscured initially by the internal lights of the plane, several miles off to the North of my window seat, I saw a flash in the sky. Having isolated myself in a pseudo-observatory with the Czech Airlines blanket, I discovered that I was looking at a fully-fledged lighting storm - lower than the plane. Hundreds upon hundreds of forks of lightning, less than a second apart, for ten minutes, each bright enough to light up two separate layers of cloud, at a lower altitude than the plane. It truly was incredible to see; almost science-fiction-like and something I'm sure not many people will get to see.

The other incredible thing was the number of non-Kosher meals on the flight! There seems to be a direct correlation between longer hair length of an Israeli, and likelihood to not keep Kosher...

Landing in Israel is always a bit of an emotional time for me, as the lights of Tel Aviv draw nearer. This time was no exception, as the first hint of daylight just started to show, and the skyscrapers of the city pierced the early morning mist.

0530, and I find myself on a sherut (private hire minibus), to Jerusalem. A Japanese, a Norweigan and a Jew are on a minbus together. No, it's not a joke... we were also joined by two Americans, a Canadian, two ex-pat Americans, and even an Israeli! By the time I was in Jerusalem, the sun had just come up...