{"id":2558,"date":"2011-12-08T22:49:38","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T04:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/?p=2558"},"modified":"2011-12-08T22:50:02","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T04:50:02","slug":"five-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/archives\/2558","title":{"rendered":"Five years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>5 years <a title=\"At the airport in Tel Aviv by Sholeh, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sholeh\/318699983\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"border: 5px solid black;\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/131\/318699983_b8a354a024_m.jpg\" alt=\"At the airport in Tel Aviv\" width=\"145\" height=\"125\" \/><\/a>ago today at 1:00 pm, my plane landed in Haifa, Israel. I was starting 18 months of service at the Baha&#8217;i World Center. I waited for 2 hours at the airport because the person who was picking me up got a flat tire.<em> <\/em>I had some time to kill, so I took a photo of the screen that showed my flight.<em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<p>It was December but it was warm, and I slept in the car, but when we came around the side of the mountain, the city was spread out in front of me, and it felt like coming home. <a title=\"View from the living room by Sholeh, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sholeh\/318700781\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"border: 5px solid black;\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/132\/318700781_541c5516cc_m.jpg\" alt=\"View from the living room\" width=\"200\" height=\"149\" \/><\/a>Overwhelmed, everything felt a little bit surreal. My aunt and uncle were in the same apartment building, a childhood friend turned out to be one of my roommates, and I had the best views from my apartment: the Shrine of the Bab, the city of Haifa, and the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n<p>Everything seems better in hindsight, of course. I remember being incredibly lonely, but also really happy. Very few of us had internet at home, and every day things felt a little more distant everywhere else. One of the advantages of not having internet or tv for the first 10 months was the sheer amount of books that I read. I was 23 years old, in a new life.<\/p>\n<p>Even 3 1\/2 years after returning to the United States, I still miss it. I miss the Shrines, the year-round flowers, the history and age of Israel, exploring (wish I had done more of that!), the people, the warmth&#8230;(I may have been one of the few people that LOVE hot weather). Everything.<\/p>\n<p><em>I miss it every day.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>5 years ago today at 1:00 pm, my plane landed in Haifa, Israel. I was starting 18 months of service at the Baha&#8217;i World Center. I waited for 2 hours at the airport because the person who was picking me&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haifa","category-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2558"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2568,"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2558\/revisions\/2568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sholeh.calmstorm.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}