Connecting as friends is a surprisingly essential step to making a good cohort. When we boarded the plane from Philly, we knew each other as fellow drones in all day seminars in classrooms. Some of us had made connections, and some of us knew each other from before Write On, but we weren’t much of a cohort yet. That all changed when we found each other on a 12 hour flight together. We were each other’s only solace amongst strangers we had interviewed hours before. Some of us took the opportunity to bond over the large selection of movies on the flight. We really got to know and love those faulty touch screens on the back of the chairs in front of us, playing each other in games of trivia and chess, reviewing movies together, and seemingly every 20 minutes checking the GPS monitor to show where over the Atlantic Ocean we were and when we would finally land at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.
As the flight drew on, many of us grew tired and fell asleep. I was one of the unlucky few that did not sleep during the flight. On the plus side, I am now an expert at solitaire, or so I like to think. Another thought on our minds: jet lag. How would we overcome jet lag on a 10 day trip? That’s another hidden positive to staying up during the flight: you’re already tired, so falling asleep at night isn’t hard to do. We landed in broad daylight. As the plane drifted ever closer to the land that some of us were excited to return to, and others to see for the first time, the suspense was almost painful.
Finally, we heard the pilot announce that they had been cleared to land. We heard the landing gear lower, the turbulence pick up mildly, and we all got ready for that wonderful thud that meant we had touched down. “We’re in Israel!” some of us said. We all clapped. We all got off the plane, bonded closer than we had been, which was good, considering that most of us hadn’t brushed our teeth since the morning before.