A French Connection

After a bit of a break and a few thousand miles, it’s time to pick up the story of OG’s trek to Israel that has looked like a trek away from Israel for a while now. For the last few posts and the last few countries, I’ve included a thread of a contrast between the adventurous and idyllic nature of the rest of the bicycle trip through Europe, with a few calamitous episodes strewn therein, and the torturous experience of trying to meet the demands of the Israeli bureaucracy that I had come to Europe to vanquish in the first place. After the magnificent mugging in Budapest, things started to take an interesting turn for the positive concerning the Israelis, however. That’s pretty much going to be the subject of this post. In order to tell the story, though, I think I’m going to have to review some of the uncomfortable details of the quest to complete my Aliyah requirements, as I haven’t really laid them out thus far.

So, after collecting my German background check, I had all of the documents I would need to schedule an interview with the Jewish Agency and then have everything reviewed to make a final determination if the state of Israel was going to let me settle there under the Israeli Right of Return. I am a convert, and I am a convert to Reform Judaism, so there will be a lot to that final review and determination, but I was not quite there yet. I was also going to have to have all of my documents reviewed physically by a Jewish Agency representative.

The first stroke of good luck that would fall my way was that Deborah, my Jewish Agency representative in Jerusalem, found an official in Berlin who would be able to help me take care of things. As per usual, nobody responded to my e-mails to Berlin requesting aid, so after again complaining to Deborah, she worked some kind of magic, and I found myself in touch with Mariah in Berlin. Deborah brings good luck. More on this below.

While all of this was going on, however, I had been continuing my bicycling around, eventually making my way toward Munich, where I had thought I might be able to get some help from the US Consulate with some things, and then after that, to Salzburg, my next stop on the trip that was originally supposed to end in Cypress with me waiting for a thumbs up to take a short flight from there into the Holy Land. It was in Salzburg, though, that the Los Angeles office of the Jewish Agency got involved. That office should have been courtesy copied on all the previous e-mail traffic and other conversations, but due to my oversight it hadn’t been, so now another arm of the bureaucratic engine was involved that really didn’t know very much about the trials and traumas of the voyage thus far.

Despite this, however, both Los Angeles and Jerusalem had given me the go ahead to have everything looked at in Berlin, but then, out of nowhere, as if Berlin had no idea about anything at all, that office contradicted everything that LA and Jerusalem had been saying and told me to work only with the LA office. That was the point that, instead of taking a train up to Berlin, I rode my bicycle across the breadth of Austria in two days in order to just have everything except my passport (which I needed with me while abroad) mailed from Vienna to LA to be reviewed.

It was also at this time that the LA office told me that the background check from the USA had gotten too old. Even though I had not been in the USA to commit any crimes, I would need to prove this yet again with a background check from the United States for a second time. I’m not sure if you can imagine my despondency. After trying to get a birth certificate from Texas for months, I was only able to get one by riding around Texas getting one in person. After months of trying to get a marriage certificate, I was only able get one by taking a bus to Colorado to get one in person. And after trying to get a divorce certificate from Arizona for months, I was only able to get one by heading back to my mom’s in Arizona yet again to get one in person. Finally, after trying to get a criminal background check from Germany for months, I was only able to get one by sailing and riding my bike halfway around the world to go to Germany to get one in person. Now, with those documents in hand, sitting in Europe surrounded by Germans and Austrians, I would have to come up with another US background check.

I had paid an investigator in LA to get me the first one, and was absolutely dreading the idea of going back to the USA to get this thing, so I got in contact with that investigator again, and after a harrowing series of events, he ultimately did. This guy hated answering the phone, only communicating by e-mail. In my experience, e-mails just don’t get answered. Especially when this trek to Israel is involved. But he took care of everything by e-mail, and I felt like I was getting a bit of a signal from God: “hey, you know, I can make sure something gets done…even via e-mail.” With help from both my mother and my father in the USA, we got that document sent off to Los Angeles to be looked at in the flesh along with everything else.

And then I made it to Vienna and sent the rest of the documents back to Los Angeles to be physically reviewed, as it looked like getting the Berlin office to take a look at things just wasn’t going to happen. When they got there, however, yet another document review revealed that yet another document had gotten too old. I needed to send the Jewish Agency, yet again, a form notarized and with apostille saying that I was (still) divorced.

That’s where things stood the morning I woke up in a hospital getting a CT scan the day after my ex wife’s birthday. I needed to have my passport physically reviewed, and I needed to get them another Affidavit of Personal Status with Apostille, which would also need to be seen by a representative in person. It was looking like I was going to spend the rest of my life on a bicycle and on cruise ships traveling back and forth across sundry corners of the globe collecting documents that took six months to get and were only valid for six months. Just after finishing this or that trek to get one document, another would expire. That’s what I had going on. And that sort of desperation and powerlessness was how I was feeling as I was laying in my bed in that Budapest hostel recovering from a concussion. At least I hadn’t been talking to newspaper salesmen who were indistinguishable from angels. I think most people would relish the chance to talk to an angel, but I seemed to be managing the feat under rather uncomfortable circumstances, the least of which was not being able to tell if any of it wasn’t a concussive delusion.

Being rather humbled by my misfortunes and overwhelmed by the demands of the paper trail being set before me, behind on schedule and uncertain as of routes and specifics, I came to the conclusion that I was just going to have to call it quits on the European bike trip. The one thing I knew was that I had a cruise scheduled to take me from Barcelona to New Orleans for a family reunion in July. Back in December and January I had hoped to have already made it to Israel, and would want to set up quickly and get back to the USA to have a bunch of stuff shipped to whatever domicile I would get myself in the new country, and this coincided well with the family reunion. As it turned out, I had not yet made it to Israel, and I still had a few more envelopes to lick. Now the LA office had told me that I could get the Affidavit of Personal Status notarized by an Israeli consulate, and it just turned out that Barcelona did have an Israeli consulate. What luck!

So the bike trip would come to an end in Budapest, and I would get myself to Barcelona as quickly as possible, where I would have nearly a month in one place, where there would be an Israeli consulate, where I would have a single address, and where I would have time to make progress on the immigration packet while waiting to cruise back to the USA. A plan had materialized: get to Barcelona ASAP. Bicycle be damned.

I looked to taking trains to Barcelona to get there as quickly as possible, but none of the apps that the European backpack kids were using gave me the ability to get a ticket with a bike, so I was going to have to get old school and go to the ticketing offices at train stations and ask them to get me to Barcelona. The ticketing office in Budapest said they could only get me as far as Munich, so I took that option. I ended up staying at the same hostel I did the first time, just for one night. I had yet another experience with a college chick at that hostel, but I think it would be too laborious of a tangent to go into it. Maybe I’ll work it in with a subsequent draft. Needless to say, I was out of Munich the next morning.

Munich, however, was unable to schedule me on the French trains that I would need to take to Spain. They could only get me to Karlsruhe on the French border. So I got out of there as early as I could to Karlsruhe and then got on the bike and rode into France to Strasbourg, a city that has one side in France and the other in Germany, where I could try to pick up a French train to Spain.

The bike ride from Karlsruhe to Strasbourg was absolutely splendid. It took me through the part of France called Alsace. I had driven through it a few times in the 90s, but as always, the bike is going to give a much more thorough experience of the nature and the architectural aspects of the places visited, and Alsace really struck me.

There were more Fachwerk houses there that I saw in most parts of Germany, and much to my delighted, everyone there spoke German! I had heard that the culture there was a mixture of French and German, and that the people there spoke a language there called Alsatian that was a sort of mixture of French and German, but when I got there, absolutely everyone spoke perfect German, so I had no difficulties communicating.

After a night in Strasbourg I was able to catch a train down to Marseilles in the south. That’s where I met Eric, a French cycling tourer I hope to be able to ride with one day, and some other travelers on the train who convinced me I was going to have to come back to France for a ride through on some other day.

Marseilles was a rude awakening, however. Of course, I looked around for the cheapest deal on accommodations I could find and thought I had secured myself a deal with a reasonably priced hostel just on the south side of the Old Port, but it turns out I had acquired for myself quite by accident a space on the outskirts of Dante’s sixth level of hell. The place was a dump, smelled like a sewer, and had no security whatsoever.

I slept on top of my backpack on a top bunk. A French friend of mine, the guy I call Bucky in another post (he doesn’t like his information used), told me Marseilles was a terrible, crime-ridden place, and this introduction comported well with my experience at the hotel, but the next morning I was blown away by the character of the city.

It was this second morning, however, that things went crazy. Israel was involved. I had just gotten an e-mail from LA clarifying all these documents that I was going to have to fly around a thousand galaxies for a thousand years to get, and was contemplating the utter impossibility of the situation when I called Deborah, basically ranting and crying at the same time about it all, this time about the need to show a document to someone in Los Angeles that I needed to have on my person while abroad. I remember blurting in desperation at one point, “It’s not a matter of dedication! If it’s simply impossible to do, it’s just impossible to do! If I just can’t do it, I just can’t do it!” She responded with absolute understanding, “I KNOW…”

Somebody knew. That was the first time I felt like I wasn’t totally alone in all this. And that’s when she said that the Jewish Agency had an office in Marseilles, and she would see if they could take a look at my passport and have that count towards my requirement. I was blown away. I would not have to travel to some other country or continent? It was quite a coincidence that the Jewish Agency would have an office just where I happened to be. With desperate and deranged glee I exclaimed, “If you can help me with this I’ll put your kids through college!” Her answer was: “Don’t make promises…yet.” I’ll never forget the sound of those three dots.

She ended the conversation by saying that I would just have to keep calm, and I would receive an e-mail with instructions. I felt like she was Betty Ross, and she had just prevented a transformation into the Hulk. I hung up the phone with thanks, absolutely beside myself from the adrenaline of the stress, and sat myself at a restaurant to look for a place to stay, thinking I would just have to make a home for myself in Marseille for who knew how long for that e-mail to come to me at bureacratic speed, that is, if it didn’t get lost in some junk file somewhere or otherwise disappear as e-mails always do for me. I thought to myself that there was nothing to do at the moment but drink away the stress. Thus I posted on Instagram:

Always nervous about e-mails getting lost, about an hour and five margaritas later I checked my e-mail out of some kind of expression of obsessive worry, and to my utter shock, the e-mail I was looking for was in my inbox! Not days later. Not weeks later. But literally minutes after getting off the phone with Deborah I got an e-mail saying that I would need to show up at their office between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM that day! And I had just gotten fall-down drunk!

There was of course absolutely zero chance that I was going to miss this appointment. They were going to view the passport of a drunkard. Further, I am absolutely paranoid about leaving my bicycle unattended, no matter how securely it is locked. So, with all the good sense of a flock of frenzied lemmings, I hopped on my bicycle, complete with 30-lb backpack with a tent and sleeping bag hanging all over the place, and rode through traffic to the stated address while representing the zenith of human inebriation.

The place ended up being impossible to find! I’m not sure if it was because of security concerns or if some sorcery pulled from some ancient kabbalistic tome was at work, but the place was not any kind of office front. It seemed to be hidden in some kind of apartment building. With nothing but e-mail with which to contact them, I fired off a mail saying, “I can’t find you!!!!!!!!!!!!” I absolutely was not going to miss this appointment. And I absolutely was not going to behave as a sober and mature adult.

Again, by some miracle, while I was frantically roaming around trying to figure out where the office was, someone came down to get me and bring me up.

There was absolutely no indication of any sort of agency anywhere. But the scene ended up resembling something from an episode of Get Smart with Maxwell Smart or some kind of seventies era James Bond movie with a secret headquarters hidden under a tree that moves away when you pull on a tree branch or some kind of sanctum hidden behind a bookcase that moves away when you touch a book. But yes, this guy, Jonathan was his name, must have gotten wind that some dude was trying to figure out where the place was, and he lead me up to what was in fact a very professional office of the Jewish Agency, complete with a water dispenser and a coffee table with magazines for guests to read.

Unable to contain my glee, I fumbled through my backpack to pull out my Captain America kippah, which would not stay on my head, as it is one of those small disk kippahs that you pin to your hair to keep from it from falling off, but I have no hair. So I ended up drunkenly chasing my kippah around the room as it fell off my head multiple times while the lady who would be verifying my passport came out to greet me. She took my passport, made some notes, and told me that the mission was accomplished. I literally kissed her hand from joyous relief.

All through this trip there has been a constant contrast of beautiful and magnificent experiences and adventure of voyaging through the majesty of European countries with difficulty after difficulty, setback after setback, and constant uphill battles of trying to get to Israel, an experience not entirely unlike the hobbit Frodo Baggins carrying the ring of power to Mordor. But at this moment, everything absolutely fell into place. The guy whose e-mails always go to junk was getting e-mails and answers INSTANTLY. Bureaucracies that normally move at a snail’s pace were active and available INSTANTLY. I made it across town drunk on a bike without dying. I was rescued from the street and lead to a secret office when I should have wandered off the edge of the world aimlessly trying to find it. I was greeted warmly when I should have been told to come back when I didn’t stink of drink and could walk without stumbling.

And I got my passport verified. So I was down to one last document, a simple form with a block to check, and I was on the way to an Israeli consulate in Barcelona. After years on this trek to Israel, just now, at this point, something actually went right. I took this as a message from God. It seemed to justify a lot of the misery that I had been enduring. That is, when everything had been going so wrong for so long, this episode of everything going absolutely right under such strange circumstances gave the entire event a miraculous flavor. For years I have wondered if all of these difficulties were a test for someone destined for a glorious path of achievement through adversity, or if they are simply God telling me: “go do something else, kiddo!” This miraculous scenario of divine intervention gave me an indication that the former situation may just be the case.

Finally able to breathe with relief, I found myself a comfortable hostel and got ready to head to Spain.

I had some good food, couscous actually, and otherwise spent a day relaxing in the fantastic weather of that city of spectacular energy and character, got to bed nice and early, and departed for Spain the following morning.