Bye bye Tel Aviv

For reasons way too complex for a blog, my trip from Tel Aviv to Istanbul had to incorporate a night in London... So a flight that would normally take just over an hour has expended into a five hour flight to London, a night at the airport and then backtracking, this time only four hours, to Istanbul.
I refused to let that get me cranky, thinking that I am, after all, traveling for the sake of travel, not to mention the pile of Frequent Flyer miles involved.

Tel Aviv airport. Probably the one place on earth where it really pays off to be Jewish. And speak Hebrew.
It was jam-packed with Israeli families (rarely less than 5-6 people, usually nan joins to look after the kids) on their way out and tourists on their way back home. And nothing easier than telling them apart. The locals are the ones who get away with the "did you pack it yourself" security check. The non-local are the ones who go through the third-degree, have their baggage checked (multiple times), required to check-in anything that looks wrong (like a laptop) and the lucky ones even get the bonus strip-search.
I managed to pass for a local and headed to the gate to catch my flight to London.
Pretty uneventful- lame movies, pretty lame food, spent most of it catching up on lost sleep. Well, I haven't really been skimping on sleep lately - maybe catching up on lost sleep was a bit of an exaggeration.

I had to spend the night in London and it made no sense to actually go into town at 9:30 at night just to travel back to the airport first thing the next morning. That's how I found out about Yotel...