En Route to California

Dear family and friends,

I'm sitting in a plane now, on my way to California. Yet another business trip, this time only one week long.

The journey is very tedious (it's been 24 hours since I left home, and two hours before I'll land in San Francisco), and the schedule I arranged this time is particularly hectic. If all goes as planned, I'll drive from the airport to the Google campus, work a few hours, then attend a private session in Palo Alto (attempting to improve my posture and alleviate my back pains), and then straight to Yosemite with my friends Dan and Tamar... Pretty crazy. Hopefully I won't be too tired to enjoy hiking.

If it was totally up to me, I'd skip business trips entirely. I don't like being away from my family, and this time, with Anat halfway through a pregnancy, it's even harder than usual. But I feel that as part of a job with Google, an occasional trip (say once a year) is necessary. As such, I'd rather travel now and not closer to the due date, let alone shortly afterwards.

With the risk of repeating a posting of mine from October, I'll mention that visiting the US is very strange for me. On one hand, I'm technically a visitor now. On the other hand, it feels very much like home (most precisely, another home). I don't feel a foreigner, which I did when visiting many years ago, before living here.

I'm used to the welcoming pros (variety of people and ethnicities, polite behavior when standing in lines), and the familiar cons (try and get a decent fresh vegetable salad at JFK...).

I touched quite a bit on identities during the present journey. In the train to the airport in Israel, I was chatting with a young women, who immigrated to Israel (made "Aliya") from Uruguay when she was 20 yo. She told me about a drastic identity switch she underwent. Later on the plane, I conversed with the woman who sate next to me, born and raised in Israel, who's been living in New York for the past 10 years.

I can identify with that my identity with that, since my identity also underwent a change, even if subtle, when living in the US.

Giora