It’s dawn. I arrived in Tel Aviv international at 4am. Everybody looks like an aunt or uncle or one of my camp friends from when I was a boy. Kinda refreshing, kinda scary. Took the train to Tel Aviv central station. Everything closed. A taxi to my friend’s place would be $30. No way. I ask a bus driver how to get to Givatayim. No English. I ask another driver. A little English. Like the officer he must have been, he orders me to get on the bus. He turns off all the lights and together like two incompatible pranksters, we whip through the empty streets of Tel Aviv. He abruptly drops me at a random bus stop and informs me that the street I’m looking for is somewhere nearby. I am to catch a cab from there – mind you it is still the pre-dawn hours. I finally hail a cab which screeches to a stop. There is already a passenger, a DJ from South Africa, who just finished a “brilliant” gig at a club. We dig the same music, of course. Upon jumping out he gives me his card.

I was supposed to arrive yesterday. When I got to Athens international airport I was informed my flight was cancelled due to a strike that shut down the entire Israel airport. Compounded with near war state that Israel is always in, this did not seem like such a welcoming omen. 3 hours later I was back at my friend’s place in Athens. Returning for another day in Athens was like entering into the cage of a beast whom you had been taunting from the other side.

The irony is that I was dying to get to Greece and I missed my flight from Berlin. On a misguided and not so fabulous traveling adventure, I caught the wrong train to the airport, wound up in the middle of nowhere. A $50 cab ride, rushing through Big Bad Berlin in order to, heaven willing, make the flight… to no avail. 10 minutes too late… How many people in the world can say they missed two flights in a row in two different countries? Not many, I bet.