Here’s what I’ve been up to in the past 24 hours or so.

The flight from Tel Aviv to NY

The airport was surprisingly uncrowded, so the security checkup didn’t take much time. The baggage check-in did take some time, however, because of a very slow clerck. In the duty-free hall I changed the mobile (although they changed the pre-agreed number) and went to the Traklin Dan (VIP with Gold MasterCard) so spend the hour or so that was left before boarding began. It’s quite nice there, free food (though nothing too fancy) and drinks, computers with internet access, TV, comfy sofas…

The flight took off on time and went very well. As expected, they started serving dinner somewhere around 2 AM, but I skipped that and overall managed to get 5 and a half hours of a sufficiently consecutive sleep. Then I watched some movie and a couple of Friends episodes, and they served breakfast. We landed on time - at about 5:30 AM NY time.

From NY to Boston

JFK is such a huge airport - they have 9 terminals and two trains going around the facility. It took me some time to pass through border control and find the domestic terminal from which my Delta flight to Boston was supposed to take off at 8. At one point I got nervous that I won’t make it (did I mention JFK is enormous ?), but then I saw people around me who had flights at 6:50 and were cheerful. And really, the domestic terminal of Delta is more like a train station - everything moves very quickly, and I suspect people arrive no sooner than 20 minutes before the flights when they fly from there. One interesting point was the very thorough security check - a guy actually turned my bag’s contents all over, dusting every thing with a small paper and putting it into a machine - this thingie can detect tiny dust of explosives and radioactive / biological materials.

Well, I made it quite in time to the gate, and then the delays began. My previous experience with flights tells me that El Al are always late and the foreign airlines are much better. Today it was the other way around - while the flight from Israel was very accurate, the domestic flight between NY and Boston was terribly late. All delays added, we took of at 9:40 (that’s a 1:40 delay for a 40-minute flight !!!), most of it because we were 20th in the line of aircrafts taking off (again - JFK is grossly oversized).

Contrary to the first flight that landed when it was still dark, the second flight had a clear sunlight and great view all the way. Wow, this part of the US is beautiful - the area (generally called New England) that stretches northeast from NY is full of small islands, green swamps, rivers, lagunas, reefs, isthmuses and forests - a small piece of paradise. Really, the view throughout the flight was amazing.

The landing in Boston was quick and simple. Since it’s a domestic flight, there were no checkups on exit whatsoever. Had I not had baggage, I’d be in the taxi 3 minutes after boarding off the plane.

Boston

The taxi from the airport to the hotel cost $27 (work is paying ) and the ride displayed a very interesting feature of Boston - the city is full with tunnels, the biggest 10-lanes wide and several kilometres long. This infrastructure allows relatively traffic-free main streets, which is very nice. The ride to the hotel took about 25 minutes - the hotel is OK, nothing special.

The cool part is how close it is to all the attractions in the city. I took a few maps from the tourist information post and it appears that everything I want to see around Boston is in walking distance, including MIT and Harvard !

I took 15 minutes to rearrange my bag and went to the center of the city for an initial recon. I already found the convention center where the conference will be (15 minutes walking from the hotel, nearby a beautiful park), bought a toothbrush (forgot mine at home !) and got a quick swing in the main tourist/business area. What can I say, this city is beautiful - I remembered from my previous trip (in 1997) that the US is a very beautiful place, well it certainly is - Boston is amazing, most houses are made of red bricks, everything is very neat and green - lots of parks and small creeks, and the traffic isn’t bad at all (because of the tunnels). The people here are very friendly and talkative.

In my search for an Internet Cafe I found a large shopping mall - about the size of the Grand Canyon, but much prettier (it is composed of shops embedded in houses and connected by avenues with glass roofs). I got quickly bored of the shops, but then… Oh then I found Barnes & Noble, a huge bookshop. Half an hour later I was found zombying around it half-conscious when I recalled that there are other things to see and pulled myself ouf of there (I’ll be back though !!) - it really was time to eat, since my last serious meal was at 7 AM.

Finding food isn’t too difficult around here (as you could probably imagine). I ended up buying a grossly non-kosher sandwitch for $6 which stuffed me pretty well. Actually - I found out that the only advantage in travelling without Anna is that I can chew a honey-ham with swiss cheese sandwitch without too much feelings of guilt :-). Otherwise, no doubt that being alone here is much less fun.

And just 20 minutes ago I’ve found this internet cafe. It costs $5 an hour (it ain’t Nepal, hey) and the computers are Macs (takes time getting used to - at least they have Firefox installed). I saw I got a mail from Eddie (from GISL) saying that we’ll probably meet tomorrow for lunch - should be fun.

My plan for the rest of the day is a more thorough recon of the city center - to help me plan what I’m going to see tomorrow and on Sunday.

Related posts:

1. Boston - day 2
2. Munich, day 1
3. Boston days 3 and 4
4. On my way to Boston
5. Boston - days 5 and 6

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.