Day 1: Getting to Israel and First Impressions

Well we all made it to Israel in one piece (the safe included).  I guess all those extra precautions we took while packing paid off.  We met the Toronto team at the El Al counter after an uneventful flight from Montreal.  I honestly think I was the only one flipping out about the safe (there were fragile stickers and "this way up" stickers covering the entire box).    

The flight to Israel was...long.  We all underwent somewhat of a culture shock.  The announcements on the plane were made in Hebrew, the entertainment was in Hebrew, the little plane snacks were in Hebrew.  It took a while to get used to not being able to understand anything, but once we got into The Weizmann Institute, everyone spoke English again.  

The Institute is absolutely enormous, like gigantic.  Before coming, I took a look at the map but I still didn't expect it to be so huge.  The weather is nice, compared to the snow we came from (the grass is green and there are flowers blooming all over the campus).  We took a tour of some of the more important buildings with some of the international students this morning.  There are kids from all over the world.  We met teams from London, Minsk, Rome, and a guy from Serbia today.  The Israeli teams don't arrive until tomorrow when the actual tournament begins.  

Hopefully by that time we will have gotten over our jet lag and have gotten a decent night's rest.  We're all so excited to be here, even though it hasn't quite set in yet.