A good signal?

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Oi veh, that man is VERY high up!
Seen from the bus to Beer Sheva at noon today. I think we were just passing Tel Sheva Junction. 
I'm having fun imagining that the little white dots (caused by the bus window reflection) are the signal emanating from the cell tower.  ; )
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Super cranes

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My morning bus was making the circle inside  Hadassah Medical Center campus when we passed two huge mobile cranes getting into position.
Needless to say, I jumped off the bus and whipped out the camera!

I stared in wonder as the crane got longer and longer, sort of like Jack and the Beanstalk.
It seemed it would reach the clouds.

Watching the operator was awesome too.
How many people need a glass ceiling for their work?

(You can enlarge all these photos with a click or two.)

Then they met!
The vertical mobile crane came near the horizontal crane that has for a long time been atop the new Davidson Tower.
(I showed you the new building in 2011 when the head engineer took us up for a hardhat tour of the new hospital.)

At least three guys were on the "bridge" and two can (barely) be seen on the horizontal part! So brave!
The crane started taking off the concrete slabs, slowly, one by one.
They were dismantling the roof crane, above my very eyes!   

About that time I came to my senses and realized I was risking my life for a blog post.
Indeed, the guard saw me from his safe indoor place and yelled at me to get the hell out of there and fast!

I have been following and documenting the construction of this tall tower since 2007.
The picture above (taken from the ancient Roman road not long ago) just may be the final  photo ever of  Sarah Davidson Tower with a crane mounted on its roof.

Hadassah is now crane-less!
Or at least until the Hadassah ladies come up with a new idea and new donations.
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(Linking to SkyWatch Friday.)
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A crowded sky

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Our skies were grey this week.

As I waited for the tram on Jaffa Street, near the Central Bus Station, I looked up and realized that all those mechanical things above me did not even exist when I moved to the Jerusalem area in 2006.
Not the electric lines for the light rail (not even the tracks existed yet).
Not the huge cranes building a station deep underground (for a high speed Tel Aviv-Jerusalem railway that may never be finished).
Not the sloping mast of Calatrava's Bridge of Strings.

The city I have known these six years is in a perpetual state of construction. 

Here is the top of the bridge as seen from Binyanei HaUma, the convention center, where the International Book Fair is going on.
(A click, than another click, will enlarge it nicely.) 
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Happy SkyWatch Friday  and happy Valentine's Day!
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Cleaning in a big way

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Every year at this time Israelis go into a cleaning frenzy.
Pesach/Passover will start next Friday evening and everything must be perfectly clean and kosher by then.

This poor guy in a cloud of dust sort of symbolized all of us, but on a grand scale.
The whole facade of the huge yeshiva in Jerusalem's Mekor Baruch haredi neighborhood was being sandblasted.
I wonder if they are going to do the dome, too . . . .

This I saw (and heard!) last Sunday, but fortunately we are now in the day of Shabbat.
In fact, it is Shabbat Hagadol.
Everyone must lay down his or her mop, dustrag, and squeegee and have a holy rest.
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Shabbat shalom!
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The shadows on the wall are for Shadow Shot Sunday 2.
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Looking high and low for inspiration

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The inspiration for illustrating Psalm 55 for our Sunday PsalmChallenge was just not coming last week.
Then yesterday the right photo appeared in the Jerusalem sky: this lone man climbing slowly to his solitary crane operator's cabin.
Please enlarge the picture to appreciate his situation.

He was working above the bottomless pit that will someday become our underground train station.

Psalm 55

1. For the leader; with instrumental music. A maskil. Of David.

2. Give ear, O God, to my prayer; hide not Yourself from my plea;

3. attend to me and answer me. I am agitated as I complain, I am in turmoil

4. at the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked; for they bring down trouble upon me and furiously harass me.

5. My heart writhes within me; deathly terrors fall upon me.

6. Fear and trembling invade me; horror overwhelms me.

7. I said, “Would that I had wings, like a dove! I would fly away and [there] dwell;

8. behold, I would flee far away; I would lodge in the wilderness. Selah

9. I would make haste to my refuge from the sweeping, tempestuous wind.

10. O LORD, confound and confuse their speech! For I see Violence and Strife in the city;

11. day and night they make rounds on its walls; Trouble and Mischief are within it.

12. Ruin is within it. Fraud and Deceit never depart from its square.

13. In fact, it is not an enemy who taunts me—I could bear that; it is not my adversary who deals insolently with me—I could hide from him;

14. but it is you, a man who is my peer, my companion, my friend;

15. he, who together with me shared sweet fellowship; we walked amidst the assembly in God’s house.

16. May He incite death against them; may they descend alive into Sheol! For wherever they reside, evils are within them.

17. But I call to God; the LORD will save me.

18. Evening and morning and noon, I complain and am in turmoil, and He hears my voice.

19. He redeems my life, unharmed, from the battle against me; indeed, many were against me.

20. May the Deity, who is enthroned from of old, hear and humble them—Selah—for they never change; they have no fear of God.

21. He stretched out his hand against his ally, he violated his covenant;

22. his mouth was smoother than butter, but battle was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, but they were drawn swords.

23. Cast your burden on the LORD and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous man fall down.

24. As for You, O God, You will make them descend to the lowest Pit; those murderous, deceitful men shall not live out half their days. As for me, I place my trust in You.

This translation is by Rabbi Benjamin Segal. His commentary and the original Hebrew text can also be found at his blog. Recommended!
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A towering crane and its reflection

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(This photo is more fun when enlarged.)

Waiting for a bus at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center is never boring.
I can always watch a tall crane in action.
Hadassah is forever building something.
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The other morning I had a bonus--a reflection for James' Weekend Reflections meme.
And there were workers on that suspended scaffold on the left!
Oi, they are brave.
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This new tower is going to be for hundreds of badly needed additional hospital beds.
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Shabbat shalom, sei gesund (be well).
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In a deep hole

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Well well, that's a big hole in the ground!
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Someday it will be Jerusalem's main train station, if the high speed train railway from Tel Aviv is ever completed.

The Central Bus Station is across the street, on the right (unseen in the photo).
Behind the big cranes is the big pylon of the Bridge of Strings/Chord Bride/Calatrava Bridge that we have been seeing on the two previous posts.
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These photos were taken through a plastic window which the builders were nice enough to leave in the barrier around the construction site.
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That's My World--we could make a tour just of cranes working in Jerusalem.
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To hell in a handbasket

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I snapped this picture from a moving bus, so I couldn't stick around to see if the workman at Hadassah hospital was going to be rising heavenward or if he was to be lowered over the side of the hill, "going to hell in a handbasket."
This strange American saying describes a situation headed for disaster without effort or in great haste.
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I think the frenzy of construction, year after year, sometimes 24 hours a day, at the Ein Kerem campus of Hadassah Medical Organization is heading for disaster.
The constant noise, dust, density, and congestion caused by the construction there can make a healthy person sick. And the poor patients . . .
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Only a big wooded valley separates that monster on the hill from my village on the next hill.
If it ever starts biting into the Jerusalem Hills and encroaching on the forest and spreading in our direction . . . oi veh's mir!
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But at least it makes a good sky picture for SkyWatch Friday, right?
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Jerusalem sky full of cranes

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The skyline of "new" Jerusalem (as opposed to the walled Old City of Jerusalem) is forever full of cranes, the one-legged kind.

(Photo is clearer when clicked upon)
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This is a rare vista from the roof of the French Hospital St. Louis which is in east Jerusalem, across the street from the Old City's New Gate. (Rare because the public is not allowed inside the old hospital, let alone onto its roof; but I was part of a special Yad Ben-Zvi tour.)
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The tower you see in the center is part of the YMCA. To its left stands the stately King David Hotel.
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Tonight and tomorrow bloggers worldwide will be showing off their skies. Visit them at SkyWatch Friday.

Evening sky

Some evening pictures from Hadassah hospital (Ein Kerem campus), about 8:00 pm, while waiting for the bus to my village.
Good ones for SkyWatch Friday, I think.
These are the same sleeping cranes you saw from far away a few weeks ago.

My village, with her first lights coming on.

It's just half an hour's walk.

And for the SkyWatchers who missed my funny windsock post, here is another shot of it, at the helicopter landing pad.
A neighboring moshav is up on top of the hill. They and we often have a few helicopter flying over us during the day or night. Not everyone is so lucky to live so close to a world-class medical center. (May we all be well and healthy!)

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Sleeping cranes

Just across the valley, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center is constantly expanding. Never-ending construction on the hilltop.
The illuminated cranes look quite pretty against the evening sky.
I guess they have to be very visible to the helicopter pilots. The round helipad is bathed in blue.
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Happy SkyWatch Friday to all who contribute their presence with a photo or a visit.

Darkness at Noon

A dark sky at 1:00 p.m. yesterday, but no rain for the past week.
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Tons of earth have been removed from this construction site on prime real estate near the Knesset. In fact, last July I posted these same cranes, but they were lying on the ground, being painted. The fancy-shmancy residential Mishkenot HaUma will be built here.
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You might find some brighter skies over at SkyWatch Friday. Hundreds of them.

Liftoff

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{ The truck pictures are more impressive when enlarged. Go on, click and enjoy the details! }

The System: Every archaeological excavation needs some form of headquarters in the field.
A lockable place to store the tools and equipment, with a table where the foreman can do a little paperwork and maybe eat his lunch. A shipping container--perfect!

Here's the inside of ours at my latest dig in Jerusalem:

The contractor hires fieldworkers like me and supplies the Israel Antiquities Authority with diggers, as needed, for the IAA's many digs. The contractor also takes care of the logistics (in consultation with the archaeologist in charge, of course).
So on the last day of our dig, right after all the forty workers had boarded their mini-buses to be driven back to East Jerusalem, the truck showed up.

It was an amazing, quick, ONE-man show! He hooked the chains onto the container.

He scampered up, then down, the container as easily as a monkey.

Strapped to his back are the controls for the hydraulic crane.

He leaned on the box to keep the proper angle,

then hoisted it and maneuvered it onto the truck.
And off they drove, one man, one container.
Job done. Such a simple system!

A crane's tiny but essential load

. Part of the fun of my current dig is watching the crane next to us building a tall apartment complex. But this afternoon I saw the crane lower its heavy chains right in the middle of the construction company's container-offices across the street. Someone filled up the two plastic bottles with cold water and the crane operator raised them. If you click on the photo you can see the bottles dangling.

  Then the brave and thirsty man climbed out of his cabin and reached out to pull the bottles in. All this about twelve stories up.

A sign of the times

On Sunday I gave in to the thrill of exploration and just followed my nose. It led me to this mysterious fence just a few blocks from Jerusalem's Central Bus Terminal.
Inspired by this guy's example I did even better and found an open gate. Pieces of a crane were scattered on the ground and you already know my fascination with cranes from a previous post.
There is a man back there painting them green. I didn't let him see me because he would have thrown me out of the forbidden-entry site. My first time to see a crane up close and I was shocked how thin and fragile it looked.
Digging of the deep foundation for Mishkenot HaUma was about to begin. This prime location makes the project and future apartments some of the most expensive in the whole country.
In 1988 I went back to college to take the 2-year program in Translation Studies at Bar-Ilan University and then worked as an editor and Hebrew-English translator. So these three signs in Translationese made me smile. Each one sounds awkward (not to mention ostentatious).
Hebrew was most economical with only four words.
English needed five.
And French a whopping seven words.

If you'd like to invest in a condominium here, LOL, complete with a "Parisian avenue" inside for upscale shopping, watch the Yair company's short video. And tell me what you think of it, the truth!

Juke Skywalker

I am presently doing archaeology on a site that is literally in the shadow of these giant cranes. Yesterday we diggers looked skyward, fascinated, as one crane built a second crane. In the first photo the arm is being moved into the proper slots of the tower. In the second, the heavy counterbalance weights are being put on the other end.

But our fascination turned to disbelief verging on horror when we saw a man scampering clear to the end of the long arm without any harness or safety anything! Then a second man was climbing up above the operator's cabin, dragging cables to put into place! Oi oi oi! The men were shouting to, or maybe at, one another. One of our dig staff who was born in the U.S.S.R., burst out laughing when she heard the guy's juicy Russian curse. She was not ready to repeat or translate it.
There is actually a man (or two) here in the photo; you will just have to believe me. The man looked so small up there that I call him Juke Skywalker. "Juke" is the Hebrew slang for a little cockroach.
Thank God the men did their job and returned to earth safely.

Sky Watch Friday has its own site now. To see hundreds of other skies and learn of the new people behind the growing group of Sky Watchers, click here and enjoy. Thanks to all who help make it fun.

Strumming the bridge harp

For those who just can't wait for its June 25 inauguration, here is a sneak preview of the Bridge of Strings. I first knew something was up when I stood gaping at this h-u-g-e crane at the entrance to downtown Jerusalem early last year. It was rolling into place on giant treads and spreading its two arms.
Over several months sections of bridge appeared on the ground. They were made in Padua, Italy and shipped to Haifa port. Then at midnight one night the traffic was blocked and with great fanfare the sections were lifted over the road onto temporary supports.
Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava had to work with many constraints, one of which you can see below. The bridge has to curve in order to get between the existing buildings.
And if you click and enlarge this photo you can see the man covering the bridge's eastern embankment with compulsory Jerusalem stone. (Since the early 20th century the law requires every building in the city to be built of, or at least faced with, Jerusalem stone.)

To quote an excellent article, "To Draw A Bridge" (see it here)--

"Calatrava . . . began by considering the constraints of the situation in Jerusalem: a tram line that needed to cut an S-shaped path from Jaffa Road to Theodor Herzl Boulevard, rising above a dense intersection and clearing the way for a public plaza beneath. The city engineer wanted to make life easier for pedestrians and also give some much needed character and panache to a congested urban entanglement through which much of the traffic arriving into the city passes. Building in Jerusalem means using Jerusalem stone, and Calatrava knew that he would need to balance the sturdy honey-colored rock with more modern touches of fluid steel and glass. He wanted to create something that would seem to fly -- its span soaring over the tops of the cars -- and hoped the structure would serve the city as a gate and not another wall."

Recently the tall mast was raised and the cables attached. But the bridge is still not suspended. Much work remains to be done. And the rails for the tram are nowhere near completed.
Calatrava was inspired to create something resembling the harp which David played while singing his psalms. The Bridge of Strings will be the first train-carrying curved suspension bridge in the world. As with everything in the Middle East, we just need patience.