Interregnum STOPS 2 and 3 | Heading to Tel Aviv

It’s July 7th 7:27PM Ecuador time. Flying crew is passing the food. I decided to savor things on the moment, without thinking too much ahead or too much backwards, but I would like to spend a few more lines wrapping up Ecuador.

Discoveries:
  • Age is overrated, I still have time to enjoy life and age is just a society’s construct
  • Balance, it takes a lot and it may be shaky again
  • Best talks are the ones in front of a beer or a cigarette, no matter the size of the group.

Learnings:
  • It’s just water: I need to face my fears (I can still die, while doing KiteSurfing in Fuerteventura, and if this is the case many of you know who to reach out to :D)
  • It’s just water, but dry your clothes immediately after otherwise you’ll damage them 
  • Pay attention to your belongings.

I believe I will be missing my Ecuador crew: such great people. It was one week, but intense. Life gets us closer and far away, what’s the likelihood I will meet some of them again in the future? Probably close to zero, but living in the moment is what matters: and it was an extraordinary beautiful moment. Thank You guys, especially Judith, Bowen, Marion: you gained a spot in my hearth.




Preparing for a long layover
I will be spending 8 hours in Schiphol airport, and hopefully I can use that time to update the blog, with pictures and videos as well, so my friend Luca won’t need to push me on updating it anymore: Galapagos had a averagely slow internet connection, so it was really hard to keep updating it, and KLM is not giving me the pleasure to use InFlight WiFi, as mentioned earlier. My plan was to make sure I could read as much as possible to get ready to Israel, and to do all the logistics as well (covid sign-up forms, etc etc), I would wait for Amsterdam, where I hope I can spend time in the airport lounge, otherwise in 8hours I will get annoyed.

In Amsterdam lives one of my best friends, he has a 1.5y old kid with an amazing Dutch girl. I really wanted to drop by and hug him, but I may not happen for 2 reasons:
  • COVID-19: it wouldn’t allow me to easily get out from the airport and I don’t want to challenge my luck – after all today started with me finding out I had lost my jacket
  • My "best friend" and I had a relation problem exactly 1y ago and since then he does not want to engage with/talk to me anymore.
I can be also a bad person, or a nasty one, depending on the circumstances I am living at a given moment. When I get close to people, it can be a disaster. Hence I decided to embark on my personal journey: I really hope he can forgive me one day, I will always consider him my big brother, I learnt a lot from him and thinking about this makes me feel emotional already and cry.

Israel Covid-19 bureoacrazy
Israel has been one of the country that better coped with covid-19 and accelerated with vaccination, together with the UK. Still, they didn’t open the country for tourism. I said earlier I can dedicate an entire blog to talk about the procedures of entering the country. I will try to provide a gist of the matter here, as it still hurts my head.

To be on the safe side – and Thanks God I did it – you need to be allowed in the country, either with an visa or an authorization from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Bar-Ilan University (BIU), pointed me in the direction of applying for a Student visa – which turned out to be the best decision. The only issue there was that it took almost 1 month to get my passport back from the Israel consulate in San Francisco, and they were not even picking the phone (sometimes I was able to reach out to them on Facebook to get some answers); at a certain point I was even scared I wouldn’t make it on time for my departure on June 24.

So I will be a student again, but the process is not complete yet. Before boarding a flight you need to have a PCR test – which is understandable. Once landed you need to have another PCR test, which it’s better for you to pay in advance, so you can pay 80USD, vs 100USD, thus saving 20USD. Then you need to enter a 14days quarantine, that you can exit only if you have COVID-19 antibodies, to be tested in a Israeli lab, as apparently Israel does not want to rely on worldwide COVID-19 vaccine certificates – which can be understandable given the likelihood of forgery of such documents. I will arrive in Tel Aviv – if everything goes as intended – on July 9th at 2:35AM. I booked my serological test for the same morning, paying about 200USD, to get speedy results.

My archaeological dig would start on Sunday, if I am allowed to exit quarantine. After the 1h document check at KLM counter in Guayaquil I am not even sure about what to expect from Israel customs. Fingers crossed.



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