Day 7

Lost luggage recovered, bad water, and a clothes tag for a spoon.

Around lunch Kenny asked me about my lost luggage. I had attempted to call Kalman Bar on Friday at the number I had been given by the TWA information agent, but had only been able to leave a message with his wife. I left an updated address, since they still probably had "King Jerusalem" on the form. Since I hadn't heard from them since then, I chances of recovering my luggage seemed more and more slim. Kenny suggested that I give the information I had to Miri, who might be able to deal more effectively with the TWA people here since she spoke Hebrew. I did so, and went back to my work.

Later that afternoon, Miri came to tell me that TWA claimed to have located my bag 4 days ago, and had sent it to the hotel. I was very surprised to learn this, because if a bag had been delivered for me at the hotel, I thought they would have called me or left some sort of message to let me know. In any case, I was very grateful to Miri, especially since this particular day I was wearing my last clean shirt. I resolved to follow up on the matter when I returned to the hotel.

At 2:00 the Internet Team was to gather for a meeting. Zeev and I still hadn't eaten lunch about 15 minutes before the meeting started, so we hurried to the corner shwarma stand for some quick food. A shwarma is basically the same as a gyro, as far as I can tell. Maybe the meat is a little different, but it's all chopped and mushed together into that big rotating chunk anyway. Zeev said this place was OK to eat, "the only thing that might be bad is if they use dog meat or something like that."

We took the shwarmas and ate them on the way back to the meeting. After the meeting, I gathered everyone for a team picture. For some reason, the focus was way off, but I'll put it here anyway:

The Internet Team at Superstudio

As I worked until about 9:30 that night, my stomach began to bother me a little bit. For a while I ignored it, but eventually it got to the point where I mentioned it to someone. "How long have you been here?", asked Marom, who is system administrator for the website here. "About 5 or 6 days." "That explains it.", he said. "It's the water."

Marom says: "...it's the water..."

On my drive back to the hotel I stopped in a small convenience store to get some bottled water. I also picked up:

• Quaker Oat Squares cereal
• 1% milk
• nonfat stawberry yogurt
• swett bagel-like thing (not a donut)

I drove back to the hotel, put away the food items in a little refigerator in the room, and went back down to the desk to ask about my luggage. The lady at the counter didn't know anything about my bag, and called a porter to the reception desk by walkie talkie. He didn't know anything about my bag, but went back through some door to look. He came back out, and asked me what my bag looked like. I told him it was a black duffelbag, and offered to help him look. He accepted, and I followed him first to a little room with a rolling cart with several suitcases -- no duffelbag. Then he got out a key and unlocked another room behind that one, and there, sitting patiently on the floor, was my poor black duffelbag, now labeled with a couple more stickers than it used to be, but otherwise the same.

I slung it over my shoulder, walked back out to the front desk, and asked to file a complaint -- If the hotel would have notified me when the bag arrived, I wouldn't have had to buy new clothes to wear during the past week. The reception lady gave me a piece of paper and a pen, and I wrote a letter to the general manager of the hotel, Gaby Azran, explaining my dissappointment.

I then returned to my room, and since I had not yet had dinner, opened my strawberry yogurt. Then it became apparent that I did not have any utensils, so I fashioned a discarded clothes tag into a spoon.

Late night strawberry yogurt dinner,
and clothes tag spoon.

With every bite I wondered if the inks used in the cardboard would leach out into my yogurt and make me feel sicker, but otherwise it worked fine. You've got to eat fast, though -- by the last couple of bites, my spoon was soggy.