Tel Aviv Rooftop

We took a pleasant diversion from trying to figure out the significance of Obama's speech (and Netanyahu's response) by means of Batim MiBifnim (Buildings from Within), the annual two day event in which scores of public buildings, studios, businesses and private apartments throw open their doors to thousands of the curious - us included. We arrived at a project on a rooftop in Florentin where a group of artists had put together a creation built of wood scrap and other discarded junk. Not exactly a completed building, more an exercise in creative recycling. Inside one of the newly created rooms a candelabra made out of upturned salt shakers. In an old flower mill turned into a design studio we found another creative use for an ordinary household object. Later, on Rothschild, I noticed that someone had knitted some socks onto the feet of Dizengoff's horse. On Rabin Square, Tel Aviv's equivalent of Cairo's Tahrir, the newly renovated 'ecological pool' (wat...

Yes, we had to get up at 3.30 a.m., gulp a Turkish coffee on the Rooftop and hit the road. But by about 6.30, this was the scene. Moran , our trusty 'pilot' is shooting blasts of hot air into the balloon that will take us over 'bitronot Ruhama' (the Ruhama Badlands). Anticipation among the ballooners - a mixed bunch of young couples, friends, a father and daughter (and us) - is running high.     With the balloon beginning to rise, we clamber into the padded cubicles that make up the basket - and, almost imperceptibly, the whole contraption rises into the air.   At first you are at tree top level. Then, without noticing, a little higher, and able to make out the patterns on the mosaic floor of a Byzantine church.  And before you can say Phileas Fogg, you are several hundred metres up and looking down on a smaller balloon (the honeymoon flight) and across a wide vista of shifting clouds, the landscape suddenly illuminated by the rising sun (worth...