I almost managed to miss the flight, but made it on time to the airport anyway. Air Baltic was using a small Fokker-50 propeller plane again, and the plane was suffering slight technical difficulties before being able to depart Riga. I had to wait around half an hour in the plane for one of the radios being replaced by a technician...
One hour and twenty minutes later the plane safely landed to Turku and I was back in Finland. Today was the first work day after vacation, not a very efficient one though.. Still missing my motivation and having slight problems adjusting myself into being back here again. I'm also suffering some serious problems speaking Finnish after only using English for a few weeks :)
Next weekend I will be spending in Poland, and after that probably staying in Finland for a few months.. Or well, maybe Lithuania in September for a weekend. Expect to see the next longer travel blog maybe in December, although the destination still stays undecided. Maybe South America or Southeast Asia for 2 weeks? :)
4 hours of half sleeping, and we landed to Riga.. And is the weather gay? Is it? YES. We have not seen a single fcking raincloud in three weeks, and now Riga is dark as night, covered by thick clouds, temperature being 15C and its raining... Lovely... Fuck the nordic weather.
Anyway, I guess we will grab a taxi and head to Tors place, for a few hours of sleep..
First, Air Baltic had changed the flight schedule, so the flight will depart an hour later than what our tickets say. That was not yet much of a problem..
While we were waiting for the check-in counter to open, I wandered around the airport taking a few photos, gaining attention of a security guard and earning myself an extra security check. When the guard flipped through my passport and saw the Syrian, Iraqi etc stamps I knew the conversation would be long...
Well, it wasn't that bad, and I was let back waiting. Before the check-in we had to go through a security check, and after half an hour of queuing and being questioned again, I was told I had won another extra security check. The reason turned out to be the black sea mud, which I had in my bag in form of a cosmetic product. The mud had to travel in a separate huge cardboard box with a security guy explaining the situation to the airline. Well, I had never thought mud could be considered a terrorist weapon or something like that.
The next trouble followed on the check-in desk. It was not exactly easy to get the girl there to believe we really wanted her to check us in only until Riga, not Helsinki as our tickets said. She insisted that we needed tickets out of Riga, which we really didn't see any reason for as Finland and Latvia are both schengen countries. Some moments of confusion, and we got our boarding passes to Riga.. Or, I got, Don was told he was missing a security check sticker and had won an extra security check also :)
Lets see what comes next....
So, good bye Israel and the Middle East, it has been fun and Ill surely return at least to Israel very soon :)
The most active nightlife area of the city was totally full of young people, partying on the street and on the terraces of the bars. We stopped by a cafe playing nice rock music, and were about to go somewhere else as the place was slightly empty.. The bartenders persuaded us to stay, and promised to offer us free tequila shots, free narquila and some metal music. Well, that offer couldn't be resisted and we had beers in there :)
After that, we headed down to an alternative music bar, where artistic-looking people were mostly sitting on the street enjoying their beers. Not a bad place either. It's really shame we had no more time for this city, as it both has really a lot of historical daytime sights and seems to have a great nightlife also :)
It's sometimes funny to notice how divided the city is. There is a Palestinian beer named Taybeh, which we were enjoying last night in one of the alternative places here. Today we were asking for Taybeh in many places, and getting answers like "It's an Arab beer, you are in Israel, get a Jewish one" and "I haven't seen it around here in 15 years".. And still the place right next door was happily selling it. The another alternative place we went today had it on tap, without a name tag :)
I forgot to mention it earlier, but there are really a lot of people on the street wearing the traditional Jewish costumes, mostly (or only) men. Too bad I don't have any photos of them...
Now it's time to move to the airport after packing up our stuff and enjoy a few more hours of strict Israeli security checks and possible interrogations with our passport stamps. The plane will take off at 05.15, and we should be in Riga at 09.45 in the morning, probably closely resembling zombies at that point.
Then the rest of the day was spent walking around the old town of Jerusalem. As I mentioned yesterday, today and yesterday evening the Jewish were having a religious festival day, which meant all the important sights in here were closed. We got to visit the Western Wall and Church of the Holy Sepulchre though. The later is probably the most holy place of the christian religion, and was actually pretty nice to see. Of course it was crowded by tourist :)
Back in the hotel now, thinking if we should sleep for a while. Our flight departs from Tel Aviv at 05.15, and the security checks will probably take a few hours again so we have to leave Jerusalem around 01 am..
We will be flying to Riga, Latvia and spending the weekend in there, having a Couchsurfing party event. On Sunday evening we will fly back to Finland then..
Too bad we have to leave Jerusalem this quickly. I will definitely be back in here shortly, to see the city (and the country) a bit more. In addition to the other things mentioned earlier, the climate is also next to perfect. It is the hottest time of year here, and still the daytime temperature barely raises to 33-34C with reasonable humidity, being really comfortable.
So, we tried to take a bus from the main bus station to the old town, and 20 minutes later we found ourself in middle of nowhere, on the other end of the bus line we were supposed to be using. Some swearwords, changing to the other side of the road and riding the same bus line back the way we came from.. This time managing to pass by the old town and the possible location of hostels in here.
Once more we took the same bus to another direction, and this time actually managed to jump out the bus on the right place. Using Wikitravel as our guide, we found a dirt cheap hotel in a perfect location, and the hotel was actually feeling pretty nice. For our disappointment they had a curfew though, the doors would close at midnight which was kind of not what we were hoping for.
We had been planning on going out in Jerusalem today, but the curfew kinda prevented staying there for long. On the other hand, today was a some kind of religious festival day, which meant all the bars were closed so.. No much damage done. We just visited the only open bar we found for a beer and walked back to the hotel. Tomorrow it's time to see Jerusalem a bit..
We found a few bottles of Palestinian beer, and I have to say it is really good. I just have to take one of this bottles home for my collection.
As my first impressions of Israel I have to say two things. First, this is a one expensive country after all the others we have been in. The price level is really close to Finland, and some things are actually even more expensive.
The second thing is that I'm really sorry we have to leave the country so soon. I definitely have to come back to Israel at some point. So far all the people have been really nice and the country is looking great. Only Jerusalem would probably be worth of spending at least a week in here, not to mention the other cities which we don't have any time to even briefly visit.
It's also warming to be a bit closer to our own culture after a few weeks in the Arab world, not that the Arab culture would have been that bad either but.. :)
By the way, the "Middle east is too small" problem still continues to occur. On the street I suddenly hear some Finnish words, and there were a few Finnish guys behind us. Obviously the guys had been driving by car to here through Syria and Jordan, staying in the same hotel in Damascus as we did, at the same time. I heard some Finnish in there also.. :)
