Four Views From the Roof - West

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Yom Kippur 2010

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Erev Yom Kippur, Rehov Herzl.  A family walks down the centre of the normally busy street towards the Shalom Tower safe in the knowledge that they will not be mown down by a car. Yehuda Halevi, a.k.a. 'rehov habankim' because the big three banks have their headquarters here. Bereft of human or vehicular activity - as though on the day after a mystety virus had wiped out the population - the functional office towers suddenly seem functionless and the arrows on the street are pointing to nowhere. In this tempotrary deserted world the neon lights shine for no-one. All commerce halts. Capitalism takes a day off.  Apart from the clicking of the superfluous traffic lights, silence reigns. Rehov Shabazi, Neve Tzedek. Three women, one pushing a pram, walk home from the kol nidrei service that brings in Yom Kippur. They might be a grandmother (right) grandaughter (middle) and daughter (left pushing  agrandaughter. Four generations sharing the same ...
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The only matkot museum in the world

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Meet Amnon.  We met him on a stormy Shabbat morning on the side of a steep side road in Neve Tzedek. He was putting away his bicycle after giving up the idea of playing matkot on the beach, something he does on a daily basis and has been doing for at least 50 years. He invited us to see his apartment otherwise known as the Only Matkot Museum in the World. Amnon was born and bred in Neve Tzedek and is a major figure in the matkot community. There are some 350 matkot (beach paddles) of every conceivable size and colour in Amnon's matkot museum interspersed with large paintings of the northern European forest scenes so popular among people who live in hot countries. His devotion to the sport is boundless. Amnon, still sprightly now, thanks to matkot, is surrounded here by photos of him in action in younger days (click to enlarge). Now he and his fellow matkot-obsessed friends play on a concrete strip underneath one of the hotels on Gordon Beach where they have been gr...
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Marrakech

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The view from my hotel window of dawn rising over the Atlas mountains is a censored one. Had I pointed the camera down a fraction the first rays of the sun would have caught the empty street below my hotel room. This was punctuated by large holes in the asphalt made for some unknown purpose and now forgotten. On the other side of the road you would have seen a row of shuttered, empty shop fronts and in the mid-distance the ochre turrets and minarets of the Disneyesque new hotel area that is being flung up to accomodate the stream of tourists mainly from Spain, France and the UK. I wondered whether the style of these hotels, with their acres of mosaic tiles, arches and intricate latticework wooden panels reflected what the Moroccan architects wanted or what they thought the tourists wanted. A nerve wracking, seatbeltless taxi ride gets you the Medina (walled old city) which is where the real action is. Magnificent gates like the one in this picture open out into dusty, unpaved alleyway...
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