British Airways

I'm back in my dorm room in Jerusalem after a month in the States, and I would like to write about something I should have written about a month ago: my experiences with British Airways.

My flight to the States coincided with the big snowstorm in the UK, which means my original Friday flight was cancelled. After an hour on hold, I got my flight rescheduled for Monday and settled in for a Shabbat at Ahuva's--which was fine until Friday night, when my second flight got cancelled. Another hour on hold and I was booked for Tuesday.

When I got back to the Kfar on Saturday night, I learned that my roommate Estie, who was also flying British Airways, was still going out in the morning. At this point I just wanted to get home and pet the cats, so I listened to another hour of hold music before finally talking to a representative. I explained my situation, that my flight had been cancelled twice and that my roommate was flying out in the morning, asked if there was any way I could be put on her flight. After a few more minutes of hold music, she came back saying I was good to go. Why they didn't put me on that flight to begin with I'll never know, but it was that simple. She even stayed on the line a while longer so Estie and I could ask various questions about baggage allowances and special meals, juggling both of our questions and both of our accounts without ever sounding annoyed. And this after multiple days of call after call of frustrated, hour-on-hold passengers!

Since then I've had a few less pleasant experiences with British Airways, namely another call during the massive snowstorm in DC to try and reschedule my flight which was met with one very rude customer service representative. Also, whereas this entry a month ago would have mentioned the surprisingly edible food provided by British Airways--evidenced by both August flights and the January ones--maybe they're making budget cuts or something, since the food was nearly inedible for my flights back to Israel. However, I have to hand it to them; they did take off during a time when the DC metro was even shut down, and I even had a row to myself for my first flight--totally coincidental, but it made up for Mr. Customer Service Guy.

I've flown El Al before, during my first trip to Israel with AHA. They're much more expensive and, honestly, I don't think they have anything over British Airways to make it worth the cost. And with my travel luck, being able to say anything good about an airline is a miracle. I don't expect to travel much in the future, but if I do I know which airline I'll pick (assuming they stay on the cheap side of the price range, of course).

Besides--who could resist those accents and the pink and blue pillows they put on the seats?

The value of money

I owe this blog a long entry about the ending of the semester, but that entry is still to come. Right now, I would like to talk about the concept of money.

I have been spending money on food, transportation, and other daily necessities for five months now, all in shekels. As I travel around Boston now, I'm really not doing anything I haven't done before. Yet, somehow, it feels different. While I balked at a $2 bottle of water at the airport, once I converted it into shekels I realized that I'd bought a $2 (8NIS) bottle of water in Israel before, quite willingly, if not an experience I repeated again once I realized how much I'd spent. $1.80 in subway fare sounded high when I looked at how much I'd be traveling until I realized that it's not that different from Egged's $1.25 (5.9NIS) fare for those who can't pass as a youth. $4 on pizza and $8 on lo mein also seem extreme when I'm looking at buying all my meals, until I remember those $7 (26NIS) calzones I splurged on a few times. Similarly, the $3.25 (12NIS) falafels I got in Israel felt really cheap there, but really aren't when compared to that pizza.

I always knew that I don't really have any real concept of the shekel. I've been judging my purchases based on whether the number seems large, knowing that you really can't get anything for 1NIS. But it took me until this trip home to realize that I've been thinking about it in the same way I think of dining points at Brandeis: I have a fixed number of them, and as long as I don't go over I'm good. Shekels don't look like dollars, and it's not like I can earn any anyway. But in the States, where I'm used to money as something that's earned and spent and saved, it's a completely different matter. The money guilt that has evaded me in Israel comes flooding back.

I have not yet figured out the solution to this problem, or what it is I need to solve here. The lack of money guilt is very nice, though being left to spend whatever I please is probably not a good idea. Perhaps leaving my money in dollars in a US bank will solve this one.

How not to plan a trip

* Plan the entire trip between midnight and 2:30am the night before you leave.

* Stay up until 2:30am when you have to get up at 9:30am. Repeat the next night, substituting "2am" and "7:30am." Survive the trip with the help of caffeine pills. Be really crabby because of it. Travel with another person who's doing the exact same thing.

* Plan to meet someone and then have one digit wrong in her phone number.

* Plan your entire trip around websites about gay Tel Aviv, and then find out that there's nothing to see or do until night.

* Fail to realize that there are two shuks in Tel Aviv, and then go to the one that's mostly food and not random fun stuff.

* Fail to look up each and every relevant bus route.

Read: The one big important lesson I learned from my trip to Tel Aviv and Haifa with Ahuva is that I'm really not cut out to be a traveller. Going to places I'm unfamiliar with is too stressful.

The Bank Saga

Financial situations are tricky when you go abroad. Student visas don't allow for employment, so work-study is out. If your student loan is through a school with semesters and your study abroad program wants you to pay everything up front, the money available to you will be extremely lopsided. And then there are the banks and the credit cards, which charge you extra to withdraw money from ATMs (for banks) or use your card in a currency other than dollars. Capital One gets around the fees when you're looking to use a credit card, but unless you're lucky enough to have a bank without an external ATM charge (or you think to change banks to one before you go abroad!) you're sort of stuck when it comes to banks.

I was not one of the smart ones. I did not change banks before I left for Israel, and my bank is one of the worst for charges--$5 for every non-Bank of America ATM withdrawal plus a percentage of the withdrawal for being in a foreign currency. When you're living on $500 a month, that actually means something.

I thought I'd found a solution. I thought I could just open an Israeli bank account, withdraw a ton of money at once from Bank of America, and put it in the Israeli account before I became a pickpocket's jackpot. It should work, right? This is what I thought on my second day in Israel, when I was still jetlaged and clearly not thinking.

Opening a bank account in a foreign country means trusting the bank completely. You sign a bunch of forms without being able to read them and hope that your friendly neighborhood banker is telling you everything you need to know. Something seems weird? Oh, that must just be how it works in this country.

So I opened an account with Discount Bank on the second day of orientation and was told to come back in a week to get my ATM card. I come back and it's not there yet--come back in a few more days, they say. So I come back, get the (activated) card, and am told to come back tomorrow to get my "secret code," as they say here (which, btw, you don't get to change). This is weird, but okay. So I come back, get my PIN and try the card. It doesn't work. The bank worker doesn't understand what I mean, but she does manage to help me fill out the paper deposit envelope so I can put my first ever 200NIS into my brand-new bank account.

I leave and walk back to the Student Village. My phone rings; I'd dropped my wallet at the bank and I had to go pick it up. When I got there, I discovered Warning Sign #1 (which I promptly ignored and chalked up to "this is how it is in Israel"): they had given me one person's ATM card and another person's PIN. So she helped me change that deposit envelope to my account number and told me, "Come back in a week and we'll have your card." One week later, I'm told that I'll get the card in the mail.

At this point I had a whole host of other problems--including an inability to find the mailboxes and the discovery that I was given the wrong mailbox key (thus confirming my theory of "this is how it is in Israel")--which delayed this whole process. At some point, I received an ATM card in the mail. During the first week of break--now the week before Yom Kippur--I went down to the branch in Ramot Eshkol to get my card activated. Once again I tried to use the card and it wouldn't work. The bank worker wouldn't believe me and made me show her, and the ATM ate my card (because apparently that's what the machines do here if you type in the wrong PIN more than three times in a row). Turns out that while this was my card and was my PIN, it was my original card and PIN, the ones that had been cancelled when I had received that other person's card and PIN. "You'll get your new card in the mail shortly," she said. ''And I ordered you a new PIN before we figured this out, so you'll get two PINs. Just try them both and one will be right."

Okay, now this is ridiculous. It's been two months and I still can't get my money from an ATM--which is important because, as I discovered these past couple weeks, while there are many branches of the bank, not so many of them actually contain tellers. (This is doubly important during Sukkot, when the banks are only open for half a day.) The few times I could actually get someone to talk to me, they told me that they couldn't help me; I had to go back to the branch that issued the card. Well, which one? The one on campus where I opened the account, or the one in Ramat Eshkol with actual tellers?

Now classes have started, which means I'm back on campus and that original branch on campus is once again accessible. "Are you sure it's not in your mailbox?" the woman kept asking me when I told her it's been two and a half months already and I have no card. "Are you sure." YES. "Okay, I've ordered you a new card. I'll call you at the end of the week."

Is it just me, or have we come full-circle here? Honestly, I'm about ready to strangle someone. At this point all my money is in that account, and I can't get to it. I'm ready to just close the account and forget about it, but then what would I do with all that money? I'm not ready to be a walking jackpot, and there have been break-ins at the dorms so I can't even hide it somewhere in my room.

Lesson learned: if you don't know the language or the culture, don't open a bank account. Period. It's not worth the risk.

There will be another post about classes once I've had more than two of them.