If you just keep your eyes open, travel is full of laughs. This German menu, translated into English, amused me. “For salads we reached bread.”
Huh?
German menu
Laughing in pidgin
I was somewhere near the intersection of the equator and the international dateline when I saw this sign at airport security.
Plis putum algeta samting we hemi metal insaid smo basket long ples eia befor yu go thru long machine.
Just passing through Vila, in the Ripablik Blong Vanuatu, a volcanic archipelago nation independent since 1980 (before that, it was called The New Hebrides).
If you’ve ever collected stamps, as I did as a kid, your favorites were probably from Vanuatu. I remember ordering them: huge, gorgeous images of flora and fauna and, if I remember correctly, some odd-shaped stamps—I think diamond-shaped, or at least large squares on a 45-degree angle.
In the tiny airport lounge (difference: air conditioned) we were treated to banana chips and some other tasteless fried things. It was 10:00 a.m. but Bob and I toasted with sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, as we were in some other, unknown time zone.
When travel is not glamorous, it is, at least, amusing.
English as a second language
Heard at the front desk:
“Checking out, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Hope you enjoyed your stay. Your bill, sir…”
“How can I owe $670?”
“It’s only telephone charges, sir.”
“But I didn’t make that many calls. 40, 50 maybe…”
“Yes sir, that’s why your bill is $670.”
“But it’s written in the room ‘call 800 numbers free!'”
“Yes sir, 800-numbers are free—”
“They told me ‘no charge for 800 numbers!”
“Right, but—”
“I didn’t call 800! I called only 50 or 60 numbers!”
A map of quivering jelly
In school, I didn’t pay much attention to geography. This pretty much fits the American selfcentric stereotype. I did eventually learn the difference between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though, and came to understand the hierarchy of United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England. When I started to travel, I got interested in maps. I still am. I can’t resist poring over them in airline magazines, and maps stop me whenever I come across them in newspapers. My computer desktop image is a map of the world.
My interest in maps extends further, though maybe not as far as my friend Terry’s, who has actually mapped the potential mutations of the influenza virus (or something like that), except he calls it antigenic cartography.
I also like words. And I especially like when the two come together, as in mapping words. This is done brilliantly at wefeelfine.org, which maps feelings. Specifically, it maps feelings revealed in blogs. You, the user, can specify the feeling you’d like to map, the age, gender, or location of the feeler, the date, and/or the weather the feeler is experiencing. “Mounds,” one way that wefeelfine maps feelings, are wonderful living hills of quivering colorful jelly that recoil from my curser. They tell me that 34,541 bloggers are feeling better now, 7,452 are feeling empty, 383 are queasy, and at the far right of the mound map, 20 are feeling grotesque.
The creators of wefeelfine.org also gave us wordcount.org, to show us our most- and least-used words, and everything in between. No surprise that Figueres is at the end of the scale, the 86,573rd most used word. By great coincidence, my sister Jamie and I spoke of Figueres just a couple of hours before I visited wordcount.org tonight, and looked at the end of the scale. There was Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dali.
Phylotaxis.com is marvelous, too, from it’s interactive opening page to its culture-meets-science representation of the news. Science stories are represented as perfect squares in an ordered grid. Stories on culture are round, messy, and can’t stay still. Verge back toward science and the round icons begin to behave, grow corners, and try to organize themselves.
On love-lines.com, which maps love and hate, I see that one person, just minutes ago, proclaimed “You all know I like my fics crackish and my pairings even crackier, as fickle as I am with them.” I have no idea what this means. Perhaps it’s pornographic.
Meanwhile, Rome is busy mapping the realtime density of citizens by their mobile phones. Or rather, MIT did the project, which mapped concentrations of urban activity moment to moment, graphically showing (glowing!) as about a million people gathered at Circus Maximus after Italy’s World Cup victory.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice world map, on paper, on the inside of my pantry door.