However, it would be a mistake to think of Tel Aviv airport as merely a bastion of vigilance. Functional comfort is combined here with excellent landscape design, partly reproducing the Eastern Mediterranean atmosphere.
The airport of the Israeli capital consists of three terminals. Since international flights - to Europe and overseas - operate from the third, the largest and most beautiful, this is the one we will discuss.
Terminal 3 was opened in November 2004. It became Israel's grandest national project in the last decade - construction cost $860 million. The architectural design of the building combines various motifs of “Eretz Israel” (Land of Israel) - characteristic symbols, stones, vegetation. The white and yellowish Jerusalem stone that decorates the interiors relaxes and makes one forget about the hot (except for two or three winter months) Israeli climate. Apparently for the same purpose, a tall fountain was built in the inner square, in the Duty Free zone, greeting everyone who has just landed or is about to depart - thin silvery streams fall from somewhere from the ceiling, creating the illusion of rain.
In 2005, the airport handled more than 8.5 million passengers on international flights. 88 airlines operate from here.
One of the terminal's main advantages for tourists is convenient connections with the outside world, not only with Tel Aviv, but also with other cities in the country. Free transport runs between the terminals and the airport parking lots; nearby is the Egged bus station, from which buses go to all parts of the country. Three more bus lines - Superbus, Margalit and Metropoline - take passengers to Shoham, Rishon LeZion and Be'er Sheva, route 222 goes to Tel Aviv hotels, and shared taxis run to Haifa and Jerusalem. In addition, a railway station is located at the exit of the air terminal. Trains run from four in the morning to half past eleven at night along the Tel Aviv - Haifa - Akko - Nahariya route.
As a rule, you spend more time in the airport when departing - especially since airport services strongly recommend arriving at least three hours before the flight in order to complete all security checks and profiling. And if on arrival the passport control officer merely glanced at my document, smiling “Have a good time”, then on departure the security officers start asking questions even before check-in, and those seeing you off can also take part in the conversation - the secret services will not fail to inquire about your Israeli friends or relatives. The questions can be the most unexpected and completely logically unrelated: “Where did you live in Israel? What do you have in this bag? Did you go on excursions? What was the name of your bus driver? Did anyone in your family speak Hebrew? And Yiddish?” Well, of course, this dark-skinned Sephardic officer does not care whether my grandmother spoke Hebrew. What matters to him is not what you answer, but how you answer; his task is to identify a potential terrorist by psychoemotional state.
After your luggage is X-rayed, you may be sent for a more detailed search and asked to open your suitcase. In my case, the security services' attention was drawn to packages of therapeutic salt-muds (a legacy from a trip to the Dead Sea) and... books. Later it turned out that books here somehow always arouse suspicion, and knowledgeable passengers place them on top, not at the bottom, so as not to have to take out all the contents of their luggage.
After check-in, passengers proceed to a spacious hall - the so-called common concourse. “Common” because access is allowed here for those seeing off. This puzzled me: why check hand luggage so carefully if later the people seeing you off can hand something to the passenger? However, unlike other airports, in the security screening hall of Ben-Gurion you are constantly watched - near all entrances and exits, at the barrier tapes there is additional security. Cameras are cameras, but the attention of a live person is obviously more effective.
In the common concourse there are several restaurants (by the way, smoking is allowed in them) and the Shkhakim shopping center. The abundance of American brands like Donna Karan, Nine West, Kenneth Cole, etc. immediately catches the eye - the strong ties between the two countries have an effect. Despite the fact that local stores are not duty-free, they should not be ignored: upon presenting your boarding pass, the amount of tax will be deducted from the cost of your purchase. Having spotted sunglasses here, I asked the saleswoman whether the same ones were cheaper in Duty Free. She did not hesitate to call her “tax-free” colleague, and after brief calculations and conversions it turned out that “you should buy them here”.
It is surprising that the vigilance instilled over decades is harmoniously combined among Israelis with the typical Mediterranean lightness of being. During check-in I was told that the departure was delayed by an hour. At the same time, on all display boards, in the line for my destination, it said “on time”, and therefore, before hurrying to the “sterile” zone, I decided to clarify the departure time at the information desk - fortunately there are four of them in the airport. “We have no information about a delay.” — “But excuse me, my boarding pass shows a different departure time.” The information desk employee looked at the paper long and surprised, then called somewhere, shrugged; then a colleague came up to her, also stared at the numbers and was puzzled... In short, after ten minutes of oohs and sighs, I was told that no one knew anything, and they advised me, just in case, to head toward the boarding area. (By the way, the airport accepts written suggestions for service - special boxes stand near those same information desks.)
And here, at last, is passport control. A curly-haired beauty of a border guard stares at me intently for half a minute with black almond-shaped eyes. Then she looks into the passport, then at me again... and so on ten times! I try to maintain Olympic calm. “Have you somehow altered your face?” Well, yes, the photo in the passport is almost five years old...
Of course, our flight was delayed, which was announced when most passengers were already at the boarding gate. True, the airport infrastructure allows you to find something to do here too - you can have a bite to eat, do some last-minute shopping, watch planes landing and taking off through the glass walls along the entire perimeter. But you won't be able to clearly photograph all this colorful vista: the glass has tiny dark dots applied to it. And indeed: why give just anyone the opportunity to draw up a detailed plan of the airfield?..