I feel ashamed that I had actually never written this blog till today – Sep 8 while I am trying to post everything. However, the memory is still quite vivid: in order to save the last-night hotel cost, I went to the Tel-Aviv airport in the afternoon after visiting Qumran (where the Deadsea scroll was found) and Jericho (basically completely ran down, but at least I got to see this legendary city with my own eyes) – I planned to spend more time in the Tel Aviv city, but since it was Friday, most things were completely closed out – I didn’t do enough homework on the Jewish culture. I did visit the oldest street started by Family Rothchild in Tel Aviv which was built 100 years before. This year is actually 100 year anniversary for this beautiful city. It’s a very live city and really beautiful. Architecture is unique and food is good. I found a Frozen Yogurt place with Wi-fe and almost spent the whole afternoon there – probably ate more frozen yogurt than I ever did in my entire life!:)So I ended up at the airport in early evening. Since my flight is at around 5am, I had a whole night to kill.
Tried to sleep in my car at the airport carpark but the effort was not very successful. Finally went in the terminal at around 2am being extremely tired, hoping to take a good nap inside the lounge, and my nightmare started: even before I got to the check-in counter, I was stopped by two young custom officers, one of them even spoke Chinese: he told me that he studied in Beijing for one year. They started asking me all kinds of questions, even ordered me to show all pictures I took, all hotel and rental receipts, my travel journal and especially every single visa on my passport and I’ve had 4 passports in the past 8 years! The only reason was they didn’t understand why a single Chinese would visit Isarael alone – I guess I became the most suspicious one…. It was really quite annoying at this time of the day. I was so exhausted but had to answer all the stupid questions again and again. Almost got into an argument when they asked me why I came to Israel while there are so many places to visit in the middle east and Israel was not safe. I was close to explode: this was not the story I read on the Israeli official tourism site! However, I realized later that it didn’t help me at all to argue with them since I could have been kept there forever, so I shut up and just answer „Yes“ and „No“. They opened all my bags, piece by piece. I didn’t get in my gate until almost to departure time so didn’t really get chance to relax in the lounge. What a disappointing end of my visit!