May 08, 2006

So, sorry for the lack of updates lately.  I’m currently at my company’s overseas headquarters, outside of Tel Aviv in Israel.  It’s quite a flight from Los Angeles – leaving Friday at 8:00 AM and arriving Saturday at 6:00AM (or 4:00PM Israel Time).  Now granted, there are more direct ways to go, but even with only 2 direct flights, you are talking at least 18 hours of flight.  I ended up going LA to NY, then to London, and on to Tel Aviv.

One reason for taking the longer route, is that I wanted to fly on American Airlines for the majority of the trip.  One my way back, I’ll be flying my one-millionth mile on American!  I should be having a party somewhere over the Atlantic.   There IS one benefit to having flown that many miles – you receive AAdvantage Gold status for life – no need to requalify.

Anyway, Here’s a pic I took while waiting for my plane at Heathrow.

After a day of acclamating to the timezone, we were off to our training course.  We are learning all about IBM Websphere Portal, condensing a 5 day course into 2 days, so that we can spend the rest of the week on specifics that are related to my employer.

Here’s a snap of the training room – very humble, but effective.

The training building is in downtown Tel Aviv – for those of you who haven’t been there, its pretty much a regular type city.  There are certainly some distinctive features, but without all the Israeli flags everywhere, you might not know where you were.

To be sure, there are more damaged buildings around that I’m used to seeing in your average US city, but there are some places in NY that are the spitting image.  Here’s a couple of pics I took while we were walking to lunch.

Anyway, Tel Aviv is a neat place to be.  It’s my 4th trip over here, and I find myself more at home each time.  I usually stay at one of the hotels right on the beach – I’ll take a couple of pics from there later and post them tomorrow.