שישי של פעם התחנה המרכזית
Once upon a time in Jerusalem,
And this time – the central station in Romema, the mid-1980s.
The central station in Romema was for years the only terminal for departure by public transport outside the city.
A crowded and dirty complex, broken and wobbly flooring, and two sooty falafel shops at the entrance
A central intelligence for passengers that were populated by impatient women behind glass with Ora Namir hairstyles and heavy make-up that was smeared and melted in the heat and unruly ends of hair that were romantically entertained in the air of the ventilator
A printed booklet of the lines and trips of that day.
and a pencil.
Befitting a high-tech nation.
Before the entrance, on Jaffa Street stood an ATM, the splendor of Jewish creation.
The poor fighters who left the area somewhere on Friday and were given hours upon leaving had to bring a note from the ATM to the RSP on Sunday with the time when the punishment ended on Friday.
Egged stewards walked around the station and among the passengers with puffy chests and the pose of Alain Delon’s heir-
With an Egged hat with a forehead, a tiny mustache above the upper lip, a gold chain on a hairy chest, and a long pinky nail, which was a must-have item for ushers and drivers.
It seemed that if the fingernail broke, God forbid,
The owner of the toenail will receive leave without pay until the toenail returns to its full size.
Samson the hero had hair extensions, and friends of that time had a long pinky nail.
After you had already purchased tickets in a long and sweaty line, you stood in another line to wait for the bus to enter the platform (Aalek), which is a route between 2 sidewalks and an iron fence.
All the buses were stuttering and old, powered by gasoline or diesel, and thick black smoke wafted everywhere,
Before the passengers’ lungs and the remains dissipated into the nearby houses.
If the Ministry of Environmental Quality had then visited the place and monitored the air – the area would have been immediately declared as an area affected by severe air pollution, immediately closed, destroyed from the air, and covered with two meters of concrete.
In the days when Jerusalem was Jerusalem,
We used to go to the big city during our youth –
Metropolitan Tel Aviv, whose central station there competed in quality with the central station in Jerusalem.
Sellers of fake tapes of the artists of the Mizrachi singer, who at that time had just started to break through in Israel and was not played at all on the square and square radio stations,
Except for a live corner on Friday morning
that spent the cooking time and the sponge, holding the mop and moving the Mediterranean basin to the sides.
If you wanted to hear Zohar Argov, you had to go down to Tel Aviv and renew with plastic tape with a brown reel covered by a bad and faded photo of the cover.
If the cassette was of poor quality, or the tape was problematic, we would turn the gears of the tape with a pencil, so did the technological pioneers who had a Walkman, and instead of playing the cassette and running out the batteries, they would manually turn the brown reel and a pencil from here and to the moon
At the central station in Tel Aviv, they also sold the latest music from the great world.
Three past ten, and only today –
shamelessly fake
With a faded photograph on the cassette done with amateurishness and disdain.
This is how Samantha Fox looked like Jaffe the bank teller,
Depeche Mode looked like a group of rascals from Holon,
And his patient looks like a French tourist in Israel in the middle of August, who fell asleep on the beach without sunscreen, and woke up in a panic two days later to the sounds of agadoo doo.
A smelly falafel stand smokes exhaust, and a juice stand with phosphorescent and radioactive colors
And services that restore the ability to smell to tourists.
We would return home happy and satisfied, after touring the sweaty and sooty city, with the great pride of Jerusalemites returning home,
going up the Kastel,
It is hoped that the driver will not burn the brakes on the descent of the exit turn, but that he will do it quickly enough so that the bus will not suffocate on the further uphills
You see the welcome to Jerusalem from plants in the curve on the right, get off the bus and give thanks for the fresh and cool air of the city that was then the center of the world.
The people of Tel Aviv and Haifa used to look at the Jerusalemites of that time with the reverence of those who understand,
Back in the period before Tel Aviv became what it is today.
And this is not great wisdom, after all the Jerusalemites who sailed from the Kastel and arrived there more than two decades ago, and brought with them green almonds in salt,
And a serious and high-quality power addition to a city without parking and non-stop sweating.
Memories from a time that will never return, and from Jerusalem, the city that was once Israel’s top quality.
Shabbat Shalom to all, far and near, from Jerusalem.
