There is no place quite like Israel, and this is reflected in many design decisions made in this country. For instance, consider the Arrivals Hall at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which is designed around our family-centric cultural attitude.
While in many airports arriving passengers just go out into the street to pick a taxi, in Israel they go out into a huge arrivals hall. You see, it isn’t exactly about arrivals… it’s about reunion. Its Hebrew name translates as “Welcomers hall”, which reflects the fact that Israelis just love to welcome their friends and relatives when they come from overseas. Entire families show up to pick up their returning kin, and they can’t wait to hug and kiss them! Hence the huge waiting hall. This setup poses a unique design problem: how to allow the arriving passengers, as they file out of the door from Customs with their luggage carts, to come into the hall without this door being jammed with hugging, kissing family groups?
In the beginning, in the old Terminal 1, the police kept the crowd away with a plain crowd control fence; which of course only made my countrymen laugh. Would they let a flimsy fence keep them from embracing auntie a few seconds earlier? The younger kids would simply squeeze through or jump over the barrier. So when they built a proper arrivals hall they replaced the fence with a real moat, a long pool with water fountains in the middle. Moats have effectively kept attackers at bay here since the days of the crusaders, so this actually worked. And when they built the new Terminal 3, they kept the idea, now as a triangular glass fence with water flowing down its edges (a good idea, since kids can’t fall into the moat in this arrangement). You can see one of many sections of this barrier in the photo.
So now the families wait behind the water, and strain their eyes to see who will be first to spot auntie as she comes out that door at the far end of the enclosed area… and to help them in this, the airport has placed a large screen above the door that shows live video of the people approaching the door on its other, hidden side.
What a family-friendly airport! 🙂
Here is a screenshot from the form you fill to join the El Al Frequent Flier club. The form has the usual fields (take my word for it, you to whom Hebrew is Greek), but the one that drew my attention is the Title field preceding the first name. This uses a drop-down box, which presents a very comprehensive set of options: there’s Mr and Mrs, There’s Dr, there’s Prof and Rabbi (hey, this is El Al), and there’s even Adv and Judge. But the one highlighted in the screenshot is – get this – Lord.
I was in a building where someone decided to give the signage a modern look, and I saw this sign outside a restroom. The people have this angular look, with slanted heads – why not? Anything for effect…
Check the 
The intent was to keep the chuck key from getting lost, of course… you could stick it into the hole and the rubber flaps would keep it in place when it wasn’t being used to tighten the chuck. These keys were all too easy to misplace, so this was an excellent solution – as the vermiform appendix used to be when we were all eating leaves before we became humans and learned about chocolate and other delights.
“He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.”
I was busy putting the basement in order and found a box of much used Lego pieces going back to the kids’ childhood, and in it I found – as is – what you see in the photo.