\u201cWelcome home.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m caught off guard. It\u2019s my second day in Israel and here I am, amid a gaggle of cargo shorts wearing Americans and having been told by an interested local:<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome home.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m surprised. It\u2019s my seventh time abroad and never have I ever been met with something as simple, as full as an interested local telling us:<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome home.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m Jewish. It\u2019s my twenty-second year and I decided to go to Israel with my brother and forty-eight strangers on a Taglit-Birthright tour called Israel by Foot. I like hiking and learning and travel so I asked my brother in March if he wanted to go to Israel with me in August.<\/p>\n
And now here we are.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hot and dry and we\u2019re in a small town getting lunch before rafting down the Jordan River later this afternoon. We act like newborn sheep \u2013 unsure of our footing in this strange new place, surrounded by strange new people. We travel in packs \u2013 a big horde of us deciding to get either shawarma or pizza. We say toda<\/em> hesitantly \u2013 slowly letting our mouths wrap around the Hebrew words that we\u2019ve learnt. And when an interested local asks the customary,<\/p>\n \u201cTaglit?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n After seeing our troupe of loud and bumbling Americans, I nod and brace myself for the snooty Ahh<\/em> or the openly disdainful sneer that I\u2019ve come to expect in my Western travels. Armed with a neutral wardrobe, slow saunter and mastery of basic foreign language phrases, I\u2019ve traveled solo and silently throughout most of Europe, trying to cover up any signs of my American citizenship, determined to trick people into thinking that I\u2019m Canadian so as to avoid being branded by the stereotypes that follow us voyaging Americans. But instead, we\u2019re met with a simple:<\/p>\n \u201cWelcome home.\u201d<\/p>\n And then slowly, surely, miraculously, expectedly, everything begins to change.<\/p>\n New friends become familiar ones. New places become ones that I\u2019ve been to, seen, felt. New words become practiced ones.<\/p>\n The trip ends but I stay, housed in a small apartment with an eighty-four-year-old woman who speaks no English. She buys me flowers on my birthday and makes a spare set of keys for me. She takes me to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with her family. Her son drives me to Caesarea and takes me out to dinner. Her granddaughter invites me swimming and smuggles a fancy cupcake from her work for me. A relative takes me out for a birthday lunch on the beach. They each give me a gift the day I leave: a ceramic plate, a bowl of blueberries, a purse-sized prayer book.<\/p>\n It\u2019s my last day and I\u2019m at a secondhand bookstore looking for reading material for my plane ride to Greece in twenty-four hours. An interested local sees me examining English books and asks me where I\u2019m from.<\/p>\n \u201cIs this your first time to Israel?\u201d He asks, after I tell him that I\u2019m American.<\/p>\n I nod.<\/p>\n \u201cWelcome home,\u201d He says.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m surprised to find that I\u2019m not surprised by it anymore.<\/p>\n I feel at home.<\/p>\n I feel Israel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWelcome home.\u201d I\u2019m caught off guard. It\u2019s my second day in Israel and here I am, amid a gaggle of cargo shorts wearing Americans and having been told by an interested local: \u201cWelcome home.\u201d I\u2019m surprised. It\u2019s my seventh time abroad and never have I ever been met with something as simple, as full as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":97178003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1361,1778,1776,1942],"tags":[207,1989,204,1990,1775,1988,1991,1772,206],"class_list":["post-97177998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia","category-middle-east","category-solo-travel","category-travel-stories","tag-ben-gurion-international-airport","tag-heritage","tag-israel","tag-jewish","tag-lebanon","tag-reasons-to-travel","tag-taglit","tag-tel-aviv","tag-tlv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97177998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97177998"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97177998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97178023,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97177998\/revisions\/97178023"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97178003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97177998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97177998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheapoair.com\/miles-away\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97177998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}