On 11 August 2011 14:03, Itzik Edri itzik@infra.co.il wrote:
We talked before, and also today with the airport - they know about Wikimania group, and they also to expedite this process.. The manger told us today that August is the most busy month on Ben Gurion - They doing as much as they can to make things more quickly for Wikimania participates (so again SHOW YOUR TAGS!), but they also have security guidelines, that they cannot', in any case, exceed them. The security of the other passengers is on their highest priority.
Unfortunately I have to add +1 bad experience. The first question they asked me was what is the purpose of my trip, to which I answered Wikimania conference. Immediately the questioner called someone else, who took me away for inspection. The whole thing lasted about an hour an half, and included questioning by multiple persons, taking me to an other room for very detailed scanning, during which I had to strip to my underwear. Meanwhile they went through my luggage and backpack and shuffled everything, probably also tried to access my phone and laptop too, but both were locked.
After coming back I had to demonstrate that both my phone and laptop worked, and even after that they forced me to put laptop into check-in luggage, including the charger which they seemed to be very suspicious about. Yay for 5 hour layover in Amsterdam without laptop :(
The whole process made me angry and disappointed, because I had otherwise a fantastic trip. The people were borderline rude, often interrupting me in middle of sentence to do other things or letting me wait for no apparent reason or without telling me what is going on or what is going to happen. I stopped smiling after the first ten minutes or so, but humbly did everything what they asked. I was wearing Wikimania t-shirt, showed them my badge and registration confirmation.
Compared to how I was handled during my stay in Israel I was totally not expecting anything like this. I didn't heard a single "sorry for your inconvenience", only once they said me to "thank you for your cooperation". Nevertheless I'm back home now with all my stuff, and fortunately my friends had a better luck.
-Niklas
PS: I didn't find them very good-looking either, like someone claimed.