While on Senior Projects I kept having difficulties with internet access, but I wrote my posts nonetheless! Here is my first, and others will follow.

2/21/2012

We just landed in Tel Aviv at Ben Gurion Airport. Tel Aviv looks nothing like what I had expected. Sitting in the tour bus, listening to the Middle Eastern music playing on the radio, I’m in a world I do not recognize. Warm air from the window passes over my parched skin left over from the 11 hour flight, and the tangerine sunlight casually flickers across the short, beige towers. Everything is green, but not the lush green of Pennsylvania. It is the dehydrated green of the desert with underlying tones of brown and grey. I know that Israel is considered 1^st world but compared to the big cities I’m used to— Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston—Tel Aviv seems undeveloped, small, and poor. I guess this is just the beginning of feeling like I am in an entirely new world. 

-Elsa