EGAD

After 20 hours of cooling my heels in spacious airplane seats...

Minneapolis area readers, act now! This afternoon, take advantage of a rare opportunity to meet and greet with the one and only author of EGAD! Somewhere in the UM physics building, I'd expect.

Anyhow, I'm back on US soil, and no, I wasn't deported. Although from the number of people who rummaged through and swabbed my bags at Ben Gurion International, I get the impression they were vaguely suprised not to find evil weapons of mass destruction in my luggage. On the other hand, they somehow completely missed the kaffieh in my bag, which I was sure was going to get me questioned.

The sun rising over midtown Manhattan and the Newark runways as I left immigration and customs. 2005:04:29 05:50:03

I intended to write this post from Newark, actually, but decided that in the end I'm too cheap to spend seven bucks to use the wireless network for the rough hour I'd have before boarding began.

The world's cleanest subway station. Probably because the whole affair is less than a year old. The Minneapolis light rail only made it out to the airport a month or so before I left for Israel. 2005:04:29 18:00:09.

In other news, yay for light rail!

I'd never actually gotten around to riding the Minneapolis light rail before; it was only opened last summer, and it didn't yet go anywhere that I need to go. But now that it goes to the airport, I can get from there to my house in under an hour for a buck-twenty-five (with one transfer to a bus). That's even less than I'd pay for a ride of similar length from Rehovot. Sweet.

Also, being as it's quite new, this has got to be the cleanest and shiniest light rail system in the country. I didn't even notice any graffiti scratched into the windows yet. In Chicago or New York, a new subway car window doesn't go one night before it's so engraved. Then again, this ain't exactly the big city, and this ain't exactly a subway, either. More of a streetcar really, once it gets out of the tunnel under the airport. Almost quaint, except for the Jetsons look of the actual train cars.

So, here I am back in Minneapolis. Nothing's visibly changed that I can see from the street. It even still feels like October. This April thing is clearly a lie.