 Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Daniel Rosel and this channel focuses on all manner of things related to life here in Jerusalem and Israel. Did you ever think that your hobbies might just be a little bit weird? Mine personally include collecting and obsessing over hot sauces, hand grinding Turkish coffee, customizing an obscure operating system that almost nobody uses, as well as sitting on the edge of airports waiting for planes to fly over me onto a runway. However, I'd like to suggest that they all kind of pair in obscurity compared to one of those true online gems which I stumbled upon recently, the guy in Tel Aviv who has put together the internet and the world's most comprehensive guide to manhole covers. Let this video be mistaken as me trying to troll this guy, I actually think it's kind of an amazing project. Manhole covers, as he poetically puts it, are kind of like the platform nine and three quarters of the real world. They're the bridges between the cities we inhabit and the underworld of critical infrastructure that nobody really spends much time thinking about, but without which none of us urbanites could really live. Manhole covers come in various shapes and sizes and lead beneath the ground to different things or to stick with the metaphor that's called them different worlds. Some connect to a municipal sewer network called Biuvim in Hebrew and for those lucky enough to have it available in their area, that's not me, they connect to high-speed communication trunks. While others lead into underground, high-voltage electricity cable network which keep our air condition is running and the lights in our apartments turned on. Of course if you've ever found yourself weirdly curious about manhole covers, you've probably also noticed some other details. They commonly contain interesting insignia as well as other details like the name of the company that made the actual manhole cover and finally they commonly contain data markings and descriptive text that might provide clues as to what the manhole entrance beneath them actually contains. manhole.co.al provides a community operated global encyclopedia of sorts of manhole covers. Although the project is based in Israel, it contains manhole covers from quite a number of countries around the world. There's even an app for both android and ios users that allow volunteer manhole cover enthusiasts to send in photos of manhole covers. So who's the driving force between this remarkable project and why did he become fascinated by manhole covers? His name is Eli's Voluni and he lives in Tel Aviv. Here's a photo of him that he sent to me and here's one from Gilovadia from a fascinating Israel 21c article about him. I'll leave the link to that piece in the description. And finally here is a photo of a manhole cover that I snapped myself. As you can see it mentions that it carries fiber optic internet cable so if you start paying attention to these understudied forms of urban artwork you can even figure out how fiber optic internet deployments are progressing in your area of the city. Other manhole covers from Israel featured on the website include this one from Ashtos, this one from Akko's Old City bearing the urban insignia and these from the Israeli communications company Haas. Altogether the site features more than 4,000 manhole covers from all around Israel constituting 44% of the total. After that there is a surprising diversity of manhole covers from the UK, the USA, Italy and Greece. Each manhole cover like this one in London is meticulously detailed with its geo-coordinate comments from the contributor as well as its categorization. Comments are full of random pieces of historical trivia that provide information about what at first glance or perhaps the most mundane things we walk over and pass by without a second thought on a daily basis. The notes section about this manhole cover in Camden in London for example states that coal holes these are covers from the period when the houses were heated with coal into which the coal bags report so that the coals did not have to enter the houses. These lids were used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Coal holes, who knew? By clicking on the category you can browse through other manhole covers in the same category and I'll leave a link to the website in the description. Want to get more videos from me? Do please consider liking this video and subscribing to this YouTube channel.