El-Al | Brit In Jerusalem

This year marks some interesting anniversaries

10 years since the 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington. Still a terrifying attack which seems so meticulously planned. No conspiracies just radical Islam who masterminded it.

10th anniversary of Wikipedia the online encyclopedia

marks 10th years of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system was released. Still popular and its now Microsoft’s enemy to try and convert everyone to switch to Win7. Many owners of Vista and 7 based PCs complain they wish they had the speed and simplicity of XP. It took a while for XP to mature though, it was until several service packs later there was proper firewall, wireless support or use hard disks over 120Gb. Still the most popular Windows ever, and the longest lived operating system ever I think. Mac OS X came out a bit before but its changed quite a bit since when going from 10.1 to 10.2 then 10.3 etc, and now Macs have totally different CPU architecture now.

20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is quite a monument where I am, as this meant large numbers of Jews from Russia and ex-Soviet nations could move here. Currently around 15% of Israelis speak Russian.

20 years also since Ethiopian Jews were flown with El-Al airlines from Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv, giving them a new home in Israel, following poverty and hardship for the African Jewish community.

Jaffa Street is looking like a race track, there are loads of police and security, mainly trying to make sure people don’t walk across the road.

This parade is a big event that happens each year and is lots of fun. Its not political although there are soldiers there, and the police, various Christian organisations.

Vintage buses and trucks, some are very old, probably date around 1948.

Left. Gasp! The new electric lightrail train is here! Apparently its not supposed to be running yet, just a brief glimpse of it was operating today only. The electric overhead wires were powered on a couple of weeks ago, but some of the infrastructure is not finished, there are some computer screens on the bus stops are not installed yet. Right. Police dog handlers. The canines seem to be an unusual indeterminate breed, they are shorter and stockier than typical German Shepherds normally use for police and military uses.