This is a guest post from Israelinurse

I’ve spent the last two months or so putting our plans to move back to Israel into operation. Sorting out status and the appropriate paperwork, selecting a removal company, packing our furniture and belongings into cardboard boxes in spare moments during the day and by night dreaming that they wouldn’t all fit in the 20’x8’x8’ container, or if they did, that the ship sank in a stormy Bay of Biscay. In mid-March my daughter flew back to commence her search for a flat in the Gush Dan area, so I was left  to deal with the bulk of the packing up and the dispersal of anything designated ‘not going’ to charity shops or recycling. The removal men finally came on Erev Pessach; not the typical choice of slot for a Jewish mum, but the only one I could get. One of them cheerfully informed me that moving, especially abroad, is as stressful as divorce; he didn’t know the half of it.

We’re putting our house here in the UK up for sale, and I had decided that it would be considerably easier to give it the much needed ‘Changing Rooms’-style makeover after the furniture had gone, so the minute the movers had driven off, I began a top to bottom redecorating campaign of our ‘delightful Victorian terraced cottage with quirky original features’ (that’s Estate Agent speak for stairs of differing heights and those oak beams I always hit my head on). With a lot of help from family, that took just over two weeks and I finished painting the last bit of skirting board the evening before my 10 a.m. flight. In among the decorating I’ve also been cancelling direct debits, paying final bills, dealing with Estate Agents, closing bank accounts and cutting off the phone and broadband: in short, everything one does when one is leaving a place for good, including giving away the fridge and freezer and the most complex of all: trying to convince the TV Licensing body that they cannot continue taking money from me if I’m not going to be in the UK and trying to persuade HMRC to take money from me even though the tax year has only just ended.

Three days before my flying date, my partner in Israel got a call from the shipping company’s representatives to say that my container is arriving earlier than expected on this coming Sunday, and that I then have four days in which to complete customs clearance and transport it out of the port. Within those four days falls Independence Day, when everything will be closed, but still, with a bit of luck, it seemed possible. Little did I know that fate had other plans.

On Thursday morning my sister and brother-in-law arrived at 6:30 a.m. to accompany me to Manchester airport telling tales of some Icelandic volcano which had erupted in the night. At that time in the morning, this sounded just too surreal to be true. “Maybe we should phone the airport” my sister suggested. (Note to self: next time you cancel a telephone line, make the cut-off time after your flight leaves.) We set off anyway, listening all the way to the updates on the radio and hoping that my flight would manage to take off before the cloud of ash moved any further south. Upon arrival at check in, things immediately looked suspicious; an uncommonly large number of Jet 2 staff trying to look unusually helpful were milling around in the check-in area. The flight had been cancelled ten minutes previously. All they had to offer was a phone number which was probably constantly engaged, a refund or to stand in a queue with all the other two hundred or so hopefuls in an attempt to secure a spare seat on next week’s flight.

As I was trying to get my head round the implications of all this upon my shipment, the fact that due to the time difference my partner would soon be setting off on the three hour drive to the airport to collect me, that the next flight out of Manchester to Tel Aviv would be at best a week away and that for all intents and purposes I actually no longer exist in the UK, I felt a hand on my arm. “I’m a reporter with GMTV…” No time for that: at this stage not all flights had been cancelled nor the airport officially closed. I rushed to the information desk to try to get a flight out of Manchester to ….well, basically anywhere that would advance me on my journey, but no luck and within minutes it became clear that I wasn’t going to have the pleasure of looking silly in my British winter coat in balmy Tel Aviv anytime soon.

‘Operation Find Another Flight’ commenced as soon as we got to my sister’s house, which fortunately still does have a phone line and an internet connection, but of course thousands of other people were engaged in the same activity, so flights were disappearing at a truly incredible rate. Volcano willing, I’ll fly on Monday night from Heathrow, so if you happen to be at Ben Gurion airport very early on Tuesday morning and notice an exhausted and dishevelled woman who looks as though she’s been wearing the same clothes for the past 24 hours, she will have been. And that ridiculous smile on my face as I pass the Tnuva advert – ‘the cheese with the home’ – on the left going down the marble-paved walkway before passport control will be because it will never have felt so good to finally get home.

Now, if anyone has any suggestions as to how to make my explanation to the Haifa Port customs man – which is going to have to be ‘I was late because of a volcano’ – sound a little less like ‘the dog ate my homework’, I’d be very glad to hear them!

This is a guest post by Trundlemaster.

I approached my first trip to Israel with a mixture of apprehension and desire. I had a desire to see and experience some of the country, but I was apprehensive about ‘culture shock’.

Although my new wife – we married last year – had been to Israel several times before on various organised and independent trips, it was my first visit to the country and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d been given dire warnings about going, from people who had either never visited Israel or who harboured antipathy to the place. One of them even said ‘make sure that you come back with the same number of holes that you left with’ in a reference to terrorism and war.

What I found once I arrived was light years away from what the ‘know-nothings’ who get their news from the Beeb and the Guardian believe Israel is. I found a fantastic get up and go country full of people who were proud of their nation but who were polite, helpful and very kind especially when I used my rather poor Hebrew to them.

We stayed in Tel Aviv and explored the city’s restaurants and museums for some of the time and went from there to Jerusalem to visit The Kotel and to the fabulous air force museum near Beer Sheva.

We found the public transport system affordable, reliable and clean. It does take a day or two to get used to seeing armed national service personnel travelling round on the buses but that is more due to the fact that here in the UK we have been disconnected from the military due to having all volunteer armed forces, which means that the average British subject isn’t familiar with being around uniformed personnel.

Highlights of the trip apart from the Kotel were the Air Force Museum, the Haganah Musem and the Museum of the Diaspora. Jerusalem was a complete eye-opener. You can feel the power of the city’s spiritual meaning for so many, almost as soon as you step out of the bus station on Jaffa Road. To pray at the Kotel was amazing, the only way for me to describe the experience of praying there was that it was like – if it is not considered too sacrilegious – is to quote from the film Spinal Tap: ‘turning your prayer up to 11’. You really feel that the Divine Presence is strong there and it was a privilege to be there to feel that for myself.

To be there in Jerusalem after so much longing on my part was fantastic. At Seder this year the words ‘next year in Jerusalem’ will have even more meaning to me personally, having now been to Jerusalem and experienced some of the place. Leaving the place was weird, I felt that I’d left a little bit of myself behind in the city of gold and vowed to be back as soon as I could.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem was incredibly upsetting and moving in ways that I find difficult to describe in words but I felt that I could not visit Jerusalem without seeing Yad Vashem. One of the things me that impressed me about the layout of Yad Vashem was the way you emerge from the memorial burdened by the weight of what you have seen into the sunshine and a stunning view over the hills of Jerusalem.

One of the things that most impressed me about Israel however isn’t something I saw or something I did but it was something that was missing from Israel when compared to the UK.

In the UK the media and the academic institutions seem to be dominated by people who are influenced by various types of Trotskyist thinking that exploded in academia and elsewhere after 1968 and this has contributed to the constant drip-drip of anti Zionist, and anti UK propaganda emanating from the BBC and the political establishment. This has led to a left-wing orchestrated ‘cultural cringe’ where people in the UK feel they need to apologise constantly for the UK or feel ashamed of who they are.

This I found totally absent in any intrusive way with any of the Israelis we chatted to. It was a pleasure for someone like me who has had his total fill of left-wing Jew haters to be in a ‘Land without Trots’ or at least a land where the Trots do not have the sort of influence that they do in the UK. I never thought I’d be so pleased to not hear the words ‘Socialist Worker, get your Socialist Worker here’.

People appear proud of Israel’s achievements, although sad that the nations around them refuse all offers of peace, even when it is plainly in the interest of the average person in the Arab world and for everyone else in the world for there to be peace.

I couldn’t help feeling that if Israel didn’t have to spend so much money on defending itself, it could be a major engine for growth, both economically and in human terms for the Middle East. Without the existential threats it faces, it could truly be a light unto the nations around it if only it was given the chance to do so.

We only saw a fraction of what we wanted to see as we were technically on our proper honeymoon and didn’t want to be too stressed with rushing round and round from place to place. We did feel that we deserved a bit of a rest.

This only means that there is more for us to see next time we go. It was lovely to be pampered in the hotel in Tel Aviv but having seen the quality of the food in the markets I really want to self-cater next time we go. However I will make a point of eating again at the wonderful Rochele’s dairy restaurant on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, I’ve never tasted a vegetarian lasagne as wonderful as the one I had there.

I want to be the one laden down with groceries from Ha Carmel Market rushing back to cook a lovely dinner for my wife.

I was completely bowled over by Israel and Israelis and cannot wait to go back. Go to Israel – it’s fabulous.