My second day in Israel started off with a trip out to Rosh Ha’ayin to visit our customer Orange, the largest wireless provider in Israel. Since Eran would have had to spend an hour in traffic to get to my hotel and then another 40 minutes in traffic back out to the customer site, I took a taxi. Luckily Ben had printed out the address in English and Hebrew the day before, so I was able to just show the cab driver where I needed to go. After the first cab driver said he couldn’t go out of Tel Aviv, another cab showed up to get me on my way. The driver was very pleasant and had plenty of questions to ask me about the US.

As we drove out to Rosh Ha’ayin, chatting about the weather and “Heelary Cleenton”, I was once again impressed with how green everything was. It reminded me of the surrounding areas of Dallas, flat and green. You can see the highway I traveled on running west-east in the middle of this map. The green areas on each side were various farms. Seeing how fertile the land is gives you a little more perspective on why people have been fighting over this area for so long.

The Orange building (which was actually beige, nowhere near orange) was in this hip little industrial park with lots of little restaurants scattered around for good measure. Going inside, it almost looked like I walked in the Gap offices by mistake. Everyone was wearing jeans (or jean skirts) and t-shirts or button-ups. I met up with Eran and then we went in to visit with the head of computer security for Orange. He was very nice and went out of his way to speak English throughout the meeting, even though it slowed him down some. Once again, Israeli hospitality at its finest. We talked for a while….BORING WORK DETAILS SKIPPED…and Eran and I headed on our way back to Tel Aviv.

The ride back was very surreal. Since it was a warm sunny day, we put the top down on Eran’s little red sports car and made our way back to the McAfee office. By this time, traffic had cleared away, so we were jetting along down the freeway, through the farmland on our way into Tel Aviv. For some reason it struck me as very surreal. “Cruising in a convertible on our way into Tel Aviv”. I can’t quite explain why it was so odd, it just really felt like we should be blasting The Clash on the radio (yes, I know its technically about Iran, but I think you get my meaning).

We got back into the office and…MORE BORING WORK DETAILS SKIPPED…then it was time for lunch. We walked down the street to the “nice” place they tried to talk me into the previous day (instead of the “authentic” place). The menu was definitely European with chicken cordon bleu and schnitzel. I had the schnitzel and was presented with a HUGE amount of food. Seeing how large lunch was, it started making sense why dinner was usually eaten later than I am used to. After lunch, we took a walk over to the little park so that Maui could have her after lunch walk. We all stood around chatting while Maui sniffed about and then next thing we knew, she was no where to be found. We split up to look for her and I ended up spotting her at a cafe staring at people until they gave her food. All across the world, dogs are all the same

On our way back, the guys talked me in to splitting some lottery tickets with them. I figured the good will was worth spending about $2US. The winnings would have amounted to about 1 million US per person, to which I told the guys “that’s hardly worth playing!”.

In case you were wondering, we didn’t win.

We worked a little later into the evening since there was a conference call that started at 8am in California that we all needed to be in on. It was good to see the guys in Israel had as little patience for some of the rigamorale involved in these sort of calls. It was definitely a bonding moment. “Hey, you hate listening to people talk just for the sake of talking? Me too! High five!”

After the call, Liad said “the guys were hoping they could take you to dinner.” Once again, the hospitality was really impressive. Everyone at the office went out of their way to make sure I felt like an honored guest.

We went to a neat little steak house tucked into the “Tel Aviv SOHO” district. This was an older area of town that was frequented by artists and has become something of a trendy place to go for dinner or drinks. The atmosphere was nice, the food was excellent and I had a great time talking to the guys. After dinner, as we walked out, Eran mentioned that you could see my hotel if you looked around the corner. He was pointing it out to me and the other guys started yelling at him because they thought he was going to let me walk the 1/2 mile back to the hotel. It wasn’t because they thought it was dangerous, they just thought it was rude.

I got back to the hotel just in time to hop on Skype and chat with Maryanne as she was getting up to start her day. This much of a time difference is really weird.

From the “I have funny friends department”, here is a recent IM….

[16:17] me: http://litterbox.zawodny.com/i/pony.jpg
[16:17] Grant: bwahahhahahahahah
[16:17] Grant: =))
[16:18] Grant: why do all little girls want ponies
[16:18] Grant: why dont boys want ponies
[16:18] me: yeah, I have no idea
[16:18] Grant: i never wanted a pony
[16:18] Grant: wierd
[16:18] me: although all boys want puppies
[16:18] Grant: true
[16:18] Grant: hmm
[16:19] me: well, if you think about it, you don’t play all that much with a pony, but you can spend a lot of time brushing it and whatnot
[16:19] Grant: perhaps guys want a companion that is useful and girls like big companions that are stupid and dependant
[16:19] Grant: ahahahahah
[16:19] me: LOL
[16:19] me: oh man, that’s genus!
[16:19] Grant: genus
[16:19] Grant: thas me
[16:19] Grant: well we both thought the same thing in different words
[16:19] Grant: amazing
[16:20] Grant: i suspect we should take the mensa test immediately
[16:20] me: indeed
[16:20] me: how do you spell mensa?

…as soon as the lag of the jet stops kicking me in the rear.  I have been absolutely wiped out since getting back.  Hopefully it will end soon and I can write about some of the more surreal moments of being in the land the Clash made famous.

Tylenol PM is my friend. Last night I took some around 9:45 and probably didn’t last past 10:00. Woke up briefly around 6:30, but just rolled over and went back to sleep until about 7:15 or so. I woke up feeling pretty refreshed. I went down to the breakfast buffet the hotel has and was pretty unimpressed with most of it except the fruit. They had some awesome oranges. I ended up eating almost an entire plate of them!

After that, I took a cab over to the local office. I was a little worried when the cab driver asked me if the address I was going to was in Tel Aviv, but he managed to get me there pretty quickly. Once in the office, I met up with Zivan who showed me to a conference room I could use as my office while I’m here. One by one people rolled in and I was introduced to everybody. They are all really friendly. One of the founders actually yells at people if he hears them speaking Hebrew around me. “Speak English!”, he badgers as he walks by. There 2 great office dogs here as well, Maui and Simba. Maui is a friendly female golden retriever and Simba is a friendly white and yellow mutt.

The office here is on the 3rd floor and we went downstairs to a little cafe for lunch. It was super crowded and we all squeezed into one small table (the dogs camped out under the table) and had a nice lunch. They were all nice enough to give me some pointers on the table etiquette, which was basically dig in to the appetizers and don’t be concerned about using your hands. I really liked that way, it really made lunch seem a lot more personal.
I have no idea what it was I ate, it was some sort of meat patty with potato wrapped around it in some sort of red sauce on top of some rice. It was really good and SOOOOO filling. One of the people said to get 2 servings, but I really think I could have done with one.

After lunch we took a walk with the dogs around the neighborhood, enjoying the weather. All in all, its been a really nice visit.

I arrived into Tel Aviv without too much trouble, finding a very friendly cab driver to take me into town. Once I got to the hotel, things changed. It seems the careful people at Bank of America found it odd that I was using my card in Israel. I got to the check in desk and my card was declined. Having just traveled 14 hours by plane, this was very troubling to me. The people at the front counter called the number on the back of my card, which apparently doesn’t accept calls from out of the country. Then the manager came forward and said “well, we can charge you for one day and then you can get it all sorted out with your credit card company”. Of course, this didn’t matter, my card was locked. They tried and as expected, it didn’t go through. Luckily I had my laptop with Skype loaded up, so I asked “is there an internet connection I could use” to which the person at the desk said “no, I’m sorry, only guests can use it.” This made me rather annoyed, but I think I did a pretty good job of keeping my cool as I asked if there was somewhere nearby I could use for a connection. Luckily there was a bar in the hotel that had free wireless and I was able to duck in there and use that connection.

Naturally, it wasn’t as simple as calling a single number and getting the lock lifted. I went through about 25 minutes or so of getting bounced around from one customer “service” representative to another only to find that no one could do anything since my card was based in California and only a California “rep” could help me. One problem with this side of the the equation, customer service in California didn’t open until 7am PST, or 5:00pm in Israel, so that meant I had to sit around for another half hour to finally get someone to help. A very rough start to the trip.