Saturday, August 1, 2009

Signage

I was just poking around in my digital files and I found a bunch of pictures from Amsterdam of funny signs.

Lost Ear

ear

Dutch and I made a half-serious attempt to go to the Van Gogh Museum. We were thwarted by a line that wrapped around the block and continued for a good quarter mile, it was raining and we were feeling that we'd rather spend our minutes there doing something more productive (and drier) like sitting in a cafe.

Safety Locked

safetylocked

Saw this ominous stencil on the sidewalk. I appreciate that so many of the signs are in English. Or bilingual.

scienceandreason

Dutch and I both were horrified by the implications of a "world of science and reason" (Eleven's instersection of Skinnerism and Taylorism comes to mind). We're hoping that the artist was being ironic.

Button Pusher

button

Most of the official signage we saw featured stick men/women doing/indicating various things. This fleshed-out fellow in a three dimensional space was very unique and charming.

No Music

no music

We were wandering around in Vondelpark and we came across this sign. Vondelpark is a lovely urban park with wide, paved paths, broad, green lawns, picturesque lakes and civilization is never more than a few yards away.

vondelpark
Vondelpark

A place where hippie drum circles could spontaneously erupt. A place where, if I had my guitar, I'd love to sit in the warm sun and play kumbaya at the top of my lungs. So, clearly, I am not the only one inspired by the lovely nature and soft grass. I am assuming the Vondelpark Dutch prefer silence to amateur music. I don't blame them.

2 comments:

H said...

When my aunt and uncle lived in the Netherlands, they lived within a block of a playground and there was a sort of disturbing roadsign... at least to us. We renamed it "watch for child molesters" It had a little girl being chased by what appeared to be a man with a briefcase. Little did we know it was supposed to be a "watch for the children," sign. Silly Americans. We took lots of photos of that sign in 1990.

H said...

Then of course there was our confusion over the "ausfarht" signs in Germany. It took us a few miles to figure that one out.

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