Today is my birthday. This is the first time I’ve spent my birthday in a foreign country and I wanted to do something fun. A friend from college with whom I share a birthday just started at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva and I was hoping to go down there to have a celebratory dinner. Israel had other plans. I looked on the Eged website (Eged is Israel’s national bus company) to find a bus. I entered “Alon Shvut” to “Be’er Sheva” in the search window, but the website said that “there is no direct route to your destination.” I tried “Efrat” and again no dice. See, the English site will only tell you if there is a bus from the point of origin to the destination, like Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva, but won’t register any cities the bus stops at on the way. It also doesn’t tell you if there is a way to take one bus and connect to another bus. And the website has no maps of bus routes to figure that out for myself.
My cousin’s wife helped me look up the bus information on the Hebrew page, which lists connections and times, but by the time we finally figured out that there is one bus that stops by here on the way to Be’er Sheva, leaving Jerusalem at 3pm, it was 3:10, and not quite enough time to get my stuff together and make the bus. I tried the website for the relatively new train system, but found the map to be almost unusable, aside from the train not going quite where I needed it to. I could have taken a bus to Jerusalem and then a bus from there to Be’er Sheva, but with the intermittent rain, I wasn’t about to spend the next three hours in frustrated transit.
Putting the failures of Israeli transit system behind me, I went out to dinner with the cousins at a restaurant nestled in the forest with views of the valley below. We ate overlooking the lightening storm brewing in the distance, warmed by a log in the fireplace. It wasn’t so bad after all. Happy birthday to me.
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