Tel Aviv: Here we are!

Arriving in Tel Aviv.
We landed in Ben Gurion airport after a fairly quick flight from Istanbul (Apprx. 2 hrs). The plane was half-full with the Turkish Beach Volleyball team coming into Tel Aviv for a tournament. The guys on the team were like kids and could not sit still or stop playing jokes on each other. They were actually quite funny to watch. The security line was quite long, but moved along speedily and our bags were waiting for us when we were done with the formalities.

Ben Gurion Airport
The airport in Tel Aviv is a spacious place filled with lots of light. The building is built with Jerusalem stone...which we understand is a rather cheap building material, but very nice in appearance. The airport looked like a museum of modern art...except that the art we saw was not all that impressive. Especially the statue of Ben Gurion - which was given a raher large head and hair that looks like wings (perhaps, we mused, that's why they named the airport after him?). There was no one to meet us here, so we took a cab to our hotel...which is located by the beach, and around the corner from the American Embassy...a greyish box of a building that looks not very impressive and somehow foreboding, BTW.