Anecdotes on airplanes

[Enrique]

Reading the post by ChipWrecked gave me the idea of this post, a post where we detail funny anecdotes of flying. I have many, but I will only post two on this first entry. The main idea of this is to post fun anecdotes of traveling, it doesn't have to be flying it could be riding on a bus, on a train, on a horse or whatever.

Here are two anecdotes I like:
1)Three students of Mexico City and me got a scholarship to go to the Weizmann Institute to join a Summer Science Camp in Rehovot, Israel. The organizers asked us to take Mexican things to show the students from other parts of the world. As expected the three guys (the Mexicans were 3 guys and a girl) did not bring much, only a big sombrero, but the girl had lots of things, including a lot of Mexican candy.
When traveling to Israel, the security is intense, they put your bags through a special machine that can withstand bombs (if you're luggage has a bomb, it explodes inside the machine and if the bomb is not that powerful, nothing happens to the people, I think). They do a 5 minute interview with you, to do profiling, trying to see if you contradict yourself they often ask the same questions in a different phrasing.
It turns out Mexican candy looks like C4, the bomb, so the interview with the girl was very long (about an hour) and it was funny because at points the dialogue was something like this:
Inspector: This are bombs
Girl: No, they are candy.
Inspector: How do we know they are candy?
Girl: Well, you can eat it.
Inspector: If I try it might explode in my mouth
Girl: No, it's candy
Inspector: But how do I know it won't explode?
and so on.

After the one hour interview, they took the four of us to a special room did another interrogation and passed all our luggage again through the machine (and our shoes, on that day I learned my shoes "Teva" were Israeli).

2) This anecdote is shorter, it involved the flight from New York to Tel Aviv just after the interrogation. I sit down next to a Jewish couple. They seem nice, they are reading the newspaper. During the flight, a woman sitting in front of the male Jewish man, reclines her seat to sleep. He grabs the seat and pushes it forward (I have never seen someone do this). The woman looks confused and tries again. The man, again pushes her seat forward. She tries again, he does it again. It goes on for four times before she turns around:
Woman: What is your problem?
Man: I want to read, I can't read if you recline your seat.
Woman: Well, recline your seat too and you can read.
Man: I don't want to recline your seat.
Woman: But I want to sleep.
Man: But I want to read.
The comments were much more intense than I can convey with my poor writing, but I hope you get the idea. The funniest part was when the flight attendant arrive to see what the fuss was about. The flight attendant was young and you could see he had never seen something like this. I was laughing hysterically inside my head. The outcome was that the lady would not recline her seat, the Jewish guy won.
I might like to add that beside that incident, the Jewish couple was very nice, they seemed very interested in the fact that I study Mathematics. I had fun talking to them.