View allAll Photos Tagged WindowWashing,
Window washers dangle from dizzying heights while cleaning the windows of the Burj Khalifa (originally named the Burj Dubai), the highest building in the world at 828m.
Dubai, UAE, 2010
Seems like they could have designed a better platform for the window washers, no?
Bay and Elm, Toronto
In what could well have been synchronised window-washing, I just happened to be on hand as this trio are about to start work. Corner of Elizabeth and Edward Streets, Brisbane, on one of my last ventures to the office for the time being. 8 April 2020.
A lot is said about Dubai’s glitzy lifestyles and gilded expats covered in bling. Yet here is Bulo, hanging from a rope by my window on the 53rd floor, wearing a big smile, looking like a gentler and much more likeable Ugandan version of Spider Man (Miles Morales is a Latino New Yorker, after all). Camera in hand, I ask him if I can take a picture and he responds with another smile and a thumbs up through the glass. He waves to his colleague cleaning the window just below, who is even more enthusiastic to strike a pose.
It took me a little while to get used to looking down through this window. The horizon was OK, but looking down from this height comes with a dizzying vertigo that Bulo and his friend seem to be impervious to. They stick themselves to the windows with the aid of some suction cups (very much like Tom Cruise in that Mission Impossible movie) and go about cleaning the nooks and crannies of the facade of this tower (and occasionally strike a pose to the camera) as if the floor wasn’t some 200 meters below.
I don’t know much about his story, but the diligence in which he does his work reminds me that it is people like him who give life to this town. The reinvented semantic weight of the word -expat- probably doesn’t apply to him at its snob-appropriated fullest, but it is mostly the work of people like him that keep the wheel spinning around here. His sight through my window strikes me as a reminder that, if one dares scratch through the gilded surface, there is a prouder and realer city that was spawned from the desert by so many laborious hands. That beyond the blinding lights of this amazing skyline there is a lot of awe and respect to be had for the people who shrugged at the vertigo of exile and decided to come help build this idea brick by brick.
Back in Germany, Berliners were proud to say that Berlin hustles harder. That might be true if you compare it to Hamburg or Luxembourg. Not to Dubai.
It's relatively nice out today (43F) and this is probably one of the last days to get this window clean (inside and out) before it gets too cold to do it.
ODC1
It Takes Two (Window Washers) to Tango.
Window Washer Reflections. Cambridge Street, Charles River Plaza.
#iPhoneography
Hong Kong is a sea of high-rise buildings with lots of glass to keep clean. Spotted on the way to the Peak Tram lower terminal.
Not an enviable job, I'm sure. It takes a special kind of guts to work from what is basically a hanging swing seat, no less.