Welcome to Beit Shemesh:

After about an hour-long ride, we arrived at our final destination from the Ben Gurion airport to our house in Beit Shemesh. We got out of the car and started hauling out our luggage from the vehicle.

The driver left, and there we were, all four of us, two cats, and twenty bags of luggage standing outside in the garage of the house and couldn't wait to get inside and crash after not sleeping for 48 hrs. We waited with anticipation as Stephan put the keys in the door hole  and tried to open the door with the mounds of keys he had been given to the house. After many tries he realized it wasn't working and we needed a code. Now what were we going to do? Here we were on a day so hot in Israel they issued a heat warning and were trapped outside with two little exhausted kids and cats. I was about to breakdown right there in the garage but just before I was about to lose it, a car pulled over and stopped. Someone from inside it rolled down their window and said, "Hi, we just wanted to introduce ourselves." We told the nice couple about our predicament and B'H they happen to know the people who used to live in the house before us and knew the code of the house and let us in. There are no words for how relieved and happy we felt. We brought our stuff inside and the next thing on my mind was I wanted to find out was how to turn on the AC. They showed us how to do that also and also had food and water for us.

The first thing we did was pull out the inflatable mattresses and made the kids take a nap because it was still morning time and they needed to rest a bit if they were ever going to get through rest of the day until night time. The rest of the day people from the community stopped by our place on and off introducing themselves, and bringing us welcome gifts like home baked goods, water, and the hospitality committee organized a family to cook dinner for us! Our amazing next-door neighbor offered one of her fold out tables and chairs to use until we got our own, and set us up with a mini fridge right away(I didn't even think of that). She even offered to take me to the grocery store so I could get things and she said she would tell me what things were what since so many products have Hebrew writing on them. I took her up on her amazing offer which was so helpful since we didn't have a car yet. It was such a warm and inspiring welcome and made us feel we chose the right place to land in Israel.