An oddly Israeli experience, a.k.a. hooray for randomness!

In Israel, people don't plan ahead as much as they do in America. They go with the flow, and plans change with impressive frequency. This means you end up having all sorts of experiences you didn't plan on having - and sometimes, they are rather pleasant surprises.

Last night, I had plans to get together with boroparkpyro and another friend (if she has an LJ, I don't know it) for dinner. In the end, the second friend could not join us - but instead, maric23 joined in for one more visit before I head back home - and also five of boroparkpyro's friends, all in for a wedding today.

It turns out, the eight of us (well, for a while it was eight, but one left before we headed out to dinner, so then it was seven) had an amazing time. There was about an hour of hanging out down at the bottom of Agrippas Street, and then we went to this Italian restaurant that maric23 knew of. The food was okay - good, but not enough of it, really.

But the food was not the fun part.

The fun part was that all of us (I hope all of us) had such a wonderful time. It was a fairly random assortment of people - five who knew each other, true, but then there was me, who only knew one member of that group - and knew of a second but hadn't met him - and maric23 who only knew me.

And yet, we were chatting away almost at once, about everything from archaeology to Firefly. (maric23 and I were pleasantly surprised to hear sen_ichi_rei call her dessert "shiny"!) We had such a good time, we felt a need to take a group photo - see maric23's blog for that.

It was really great to meet everyone, and the fun part is, every one of us has a livejournal. Unfortunately, I didn't quite remember all of them... Of course, I already know mine and boroparkpyro and maric23, but I also met alanscottevil, who, buy some odd stroke of happenstance is related rather closely to boroparkpyro - but don't tell anyone I said that - and whose name I heard many times growing up from orisnori - so it was exciting to finally meet him in person. I also met... let's see if I get the names right... sen_ichi_rei, attackpenguin and one or two others whose user names I am missing.

So if someone wants to fill in the ones I don't have...

Anyway, it was so much more fun that I ever could have expected. A big thank you to all of you for being a part of a fabulous penultimate night in Jerusalem (well, penultimate for this trip - I hope to spend many more nights in Jerusalem in years to come, of course).

I hope all of you who came in for the wedding have a wonderful time.

It's such an amazing feeling to meet a group of people and mesh with them almost instantly - mesh so well, I think, that any stranger who walked by would have thought that each of us had known every one of the others for a long time, not just a matter of hours.