IPP40 (part 1)

Friday

We fly into Ben Gurion airport where a wall of heat greets us as we get off the plane, and it feels good. Customs and immigration turn out to be a breeze, although it takes an hour for our baggage to arrive on the carousel, with several long passages of total inactivity and one bout of baggage getting jammed in the chute and causing things to come to a grinding halt for a while.

The cab ride to the hotel is interesting - it turns out we went through Palestine, which explains a lot of the razor wire along the sides of the road and several checkpoints along the way. We get some really interesting perspectives from our taxi driver, along with the obligatory COVID conspiracy theories.

We check in and find we have a super view of the building next door, which turns out to be the other wing of the hotel.

When we try and rustle up some dinner we hit a bit of a snag - this is Jerusalem, on Shabbat, ergo no food available outside of the Shabbat meals, which we don’t feel comfortable joining for fear of offending folks deeply. Google comes to the rescue with a restaurant half an hour away that’s actually open so we grab a cab and find it. It turns out to be a trendy joint with plenty of locals - always a good sign! They find us a table and feed us some wonderful grub - that good that we immediately book a table for the next evening and enjoy a lovely stroll back to the hotel in the early evening coolness, passing hundreds of families enjoying the fresh air in Sacher Park.

Back at the hotel we find Wil in the lobby, which is interesting as he’s staying in the hotel next door - we catch up on things before heading our separate ways - it’s been a long day… we have an early-ish evening.

Saturday’s breakfast buffet provides plenty of interesting choices and I manage to solve both the orange juice (spoiler alert: looks like a beer tap) and the coffee puzzles (ditto: large nondescript brown crate with a tap on the end of it. Breakfast is already littered with puzzlers in spite of the fact that most of the gang are still in Tel Aviv until Saturday evening.

After breakfast we head off toward the botanical gardens that should be open, but we can’t find the entrance(!) so we head up a hill and through the park to the Israel Museum where we spend a few hours in the a/c… and seeing some stunning modern art and old relics.

We’re lazy and it’s hot as hell so we spring for a cab back to the hotel where the cabbie literally refuses to charge us, so I insist on giving him a handsome tip anyway.

We have a swim and probably significantly raised the average age at the pool in spite of there being a shed-load of others at the pool already…

We chill and then head out to dinner at Menza again. While we’re waiting for our Gett taxi, Dor and Yael arrive with a car load of kit for the IPP office, so after dinner (great, again!) we head up to the IPP office and I help fold a hundred or so shirts while Gill gets the briefing on the Fabric and Fibre tour arrangements from Yael.

Briefing and folding complete, we head off to the bar and find some of the usual reprobates who duly entertain us for a while. I share my gift puzzle with a few folks and thankfully nobody just solved it straight off the bat!

Somewhere around midnight I give up and leave them all to it…

Sunday

…is Fabric and Fibre day and after a proper Israeli breakfast (it’s not Shabbat!) the girls (and a couple of guys) meet up in the lobby for a day of fabric and fibre shopping – plus an excellent presentation from a gent running a long-established family business selling very exclusive handwoven fabrics - and the obligatory ice cream stop.

Once the girls have left, I join Nick to help set up the Design Competition stuff and within about an hour we have it all ship-shape, so a couple of us make an early start on playing with the puzzles while Nick’s off at a meeting - we tell ourselves it’s what he would have wanted!

Brian P arrives and soon enough is starting to make inroads into his solving agenda - he tries to literally solve every single puzzle in the design competition during IPP - this year there are 62 of them…!

I make use of the morning registration slot and get the usual swag bag of goodies, along with a couple of shirts, but I’ve passed on the Israeli sun hat as there’s not much call for them in the UK, although they would be indecently useful on some of the subsequent walking tours around Jerusalem.

A bunch of us end up having lunch in the hotel lobby restaurant…mainly so that we don’t have to brave the heat…. speaking for myself of course!

During the course of the afternoon a bunch of familiar faces arrived and soon there were plenty of Boys at the Bar (we missed you Tomas!). We started out with good intentions of going to the market for a street food dinner (highly recommended by the gang who did it the night before) but in the end we opted for dinner in the same restaurant that we’d had lunch in… only this time there were eight of us and we were in full swing having an excellent time, so they hid us away in a closed off wing of the restaurant where we duly had a brilliant time and some pretty good grub too!

A couple more hours in the design competition room finished off an excellent day…

Monday was our tour of the old city with Zev, our excellent tour guide. We started out at the Lion Gate and headed along the via Delarosa, stopping to take in the view from the Austrian Hospice rooftop. Lunch at a little tourist trap whose main attraction was their a/c (spot the theme!). After lunch we headed down into the tunnels from the Western Wall retracing our route back up to the start of our day, albeit underground along the interconnecting tunnels that showed you foundations of the old city… really well exposed for us tourists to see with Zev doing a super job of describing what we were seeing and how they’d built it all back in the day - really glad we did that tour as I probably wouldn’t have spotted the tunnel tour…

We headed back to the hotel on the tram before grabbing a quick dip in the pool to cool off, a shower to clean off the grime and headed off to the Founder’s reception.

The Founder’s reception is at a venue (Olmaya) with a superb view across the city so we get to watch the sunset and the lights around the city come on and gradually change the scene - it is stunning.

There are clumps of people chatting, making new friends, playing with puzzles and enjoying the warm evening. Just when things are feeling really sedate and civilised, a herd of goats careens through the peaceful garden encouraged onward by a young goatherd on a donkey… pursued unsuccessfully by some folks from the venue trying to stop him from running through the centre of the crowd – we all think it’s hilarious and no damage is done…

When the formalities begin, Frans gives an introduction to the video message from Jerry before introducing Gaby, Philippe du Bois’ daughter, who talked about growing up with her dad’s passion for puzzles and ending with a pic of her son, the next generation of puzzlers in the line.

Frans gets all the greenhorns to come up and introduce themselves and they all seem pretty happy to be among their tribe - my description for the evening.

We chat and laugh and play a bit until the buses take us back through the traffic to our hotel. Where I fade…