This time, it would be different! With this in mind, we decided long before the trip that, for a change, we would prepare well in advance and avoid the pre-trip stress. Indeed, we booked our flights almost six months in advance, and made advance plans and reservations for the first two hotels and for the flight from Bangkok to Ko Samui. Very unlike us. Vaccinations proved a bit problematic, with travel clinic appointments stretching well into December in most places, but the clinic in Meir hospital turned out to require a long wait and a stiff payment instead of an appointment, so we opted for that.
A week prior to departure, we made a rather long list of the things we must take care of prior to the trip, which included such items as getting new suitcases, fixing the house alarm, getting some prescription medicines (to be on the safe side) and … renewing Tamar’s passport. This one was particularly challenging, since she already had a 1-year temporary passport issued last year under similar circumstances, and the law says one cannot be issued two temporary passports in a row. But laws are made to be bent, and a kind immigration officer at the airport’s immigration office took pity on us, after commenting on how unlikely one is to make that mistake twice in a row, and did issue her the coveted passport. A day later, when I went to the pharmacy with the prescriptions we got, Tamar was refused service. The pharmacist told me I should ask Maccabi what the problem was – “the computer shows she is not entitled to service”. In Maccabi they told me I should talk to the National Insurance, because it shows she isn’t insured, and asked whether she was born in Israel, I had to acknowledge that she wasn’t, but noted that this was nearly 12 years ago – a time she has spent as an Israeli citizen. At the National Insurance, they informed me that she wasn’t registered as a resident, and asked whether, by any chance, she was issued a new passport recently. Ahaa! After a 37 minute wait on the line with the immigration office, I got a nice lady who was appalled with the inefficiency of the National Insurance. Of course Tamar’s residence status is OK. THEY make this mistake so often, and it’s so frustrating… I sympathized with her anguish over having to regularly deal with other people’s incompetence, and in return she promised to fix the situation in no time, and even read to me the urgent letter she sent with a request to solve the issue immediately. “Someone would call you back in a day or two”. Needless to say, that never happened. Eventually, Gidi issues a handwritten prescription to replace Maccabi’s digital one and we got the medicine without the HMO discount.
Around a week before the flight, we decided that this time we would pack in advance, a little bit every day. Indeed, every day during that week we decided to pack a little bit. Come Saturday, a day before the flight, we decided that it was not enough to decide to pack, and we needed to actually pack. But we already got almost everything we needed, so packing would be a piece of cake. And indeed, by 10pm we were almost totally packed. Unfortunately, the new suitcases stank so badly, even after two days of forced hyperventilation, that we had to pack all the cloths in plastic bags in the hope of partly protecting them from smelling like a chemical factory. By midnight everyone was in bed, fed and bathed, and the suitcases were ready by the door. I spent the 4 hours until the wake-up alarm preparing a dozen sandwiches, washing the dishes and then drafting a response to some annoying patent examiner’s report.
The flights with Uzbekistan Airways through Tashkent were uneventful, except for strange clapping from the passengers each time we hit a turbulence. The entertainment system malfunctioned on the first flight and was missing altogether on the second flight, so I spent the time sleeping, Daniel played backgammon against the computer (or me when I was not asleep), Tamar read a couple of new books, and Lilach prepared comments for a reporter who wrote a very nice, but mostly fictional, article about her work (the description of the potted primrose plants lining the shelves among the reagents and chemicals in her lab showed real literary promise).
In Bangkok, we discovered that one of the suitcases was severely torn en route, and filled a report with the baggage service office before heading out. The kids were hungry and thirsty, so we stopped for a midnight (or actually 1:30am) meal at the airport before taking a taxi to Villa Phra Sumen – a cozy little hotel at the center of town. Tamar, who had very little sleep the night before and none at all on the way, declared that she needed no sleep and would like to go out immediately and see the city, then flopped on the bed in her cloths and fell asleep instantaneously.
Family Trips 