Ice Sculpture Bar: Eilat.

[romaurie]

A couple of years ago a large chewing gum manufacturer in Israel hit upon a novel method to promote their new range of "Cool" chewing gum.
They rented a shop from Herod's Palace on the Eilat promenade and had the company I worked for install a blast chiller with minimal behind the scenes polyeurethane insulation.They cast shelving and fixtures in a freezer and had 2 top ice sculptors flown in from Norway to provide the very attractive sculptures.
In an attempt to reduce cost and increase profit, no oil seperator was fitted to the 5H.P. Maneurop hermetique compressor.It was a temporary promotion not supposed to last more than 3 months.It proved so popular, it was held open all through the summer.2 compressors "died" in that time and the projects manager had to scour the country to locate a replacement before everything defrosted.The temperature was held at minus 10 C.Enough to maintain the frozen fixtures and fittings whilst not freezing the bollocks off the visitors with the state of the art silver cloaks supplied with the 1 complimentary drink for the punters.
As I was the only engineer from the UK, it was decided I would be on 24hours call-out as I was used to the temperature.
Now whether as a result of that promotion or just the ever more imaginative schemes to provide entertainment for the visitors to Eilat, an ice park has been under construction for the past 3 years.
Eilat has always been very popular as the most northern coral reef in the world.Shared of course by Aqaba.It has provided a very good natural school for scuba diving due to its very calm warm waters.In fact it was my love of scuba diving and marine aquariums that originally drew me to settle here from Bournemouth.
That was some 25 years ago.
I wait with baited breath!

http://www.explore-eilat.com/nightlife.html
I will try and locate the photos I took trying to fix a dial thermometer to a wall of ice!