What Does it Mean?

While wandering the streets and pathways in another country, I always keep my eyes out for street signs.

Sometimes simple graphic depictions say things words cannot.

But this one has me stumped.





No blue dots?

No blues?

No blue color a’tall?

No blue marbles?

No bluing in my laundry?

No blue skying (for those marketing types)?

What?! What do the Brits got against the color blue?

Gah!

I showed this to The Good Man who is seriously a lot smarter than me and he told me it means no stopping (this sign is near a roadway).

How in the utter hell am I supposed to get no stopping from a blue dot with a red slash through it?

Now that I know what it is supposed to mean, this damn sign torments me.

I have to see it every day. It’s located on the path that leads to the bus stop where I catch a public shuttle bus. Every morning and evening I commute with the locals on the bus.

It’s a popular route and most of the time I can’t get a seat, so I stand and hang on to a hand strap.

This isn’t much of a problem, the trip only takes about fifteen minutes.

However.

These traffic roundabouts that British civil engineers seem to liberally scatter about make standing on a bus pretty challenging.

I am a rather sturdy girl but even I am not immune to powerful centrifugal forces. The bus drivers hit the multitude of roundabouts at considerable speed.

On the plus side, I’m building muscles in my upper body as I cling to the hand strap for dear life. My feet keep leaving the ground like Gilligan in a hurricane.

Whoooooaaaa!

Thus ends today’s “things that are weird about England” lecture.

I hope we’ve all learned something.



Photo Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the right column of this page. Photo taken with an iPhone4s and the Camera+ app.



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Karen Fayeth

Comments

  • Scott

    Ha ha, my feeling was with the public transport, at least you were never BORED there, by the time you got to your destination you were ready to take on the day. And it beats the heck out of LA where getting on a bus is tantamount to taking a pleasant stroll through a prison courtyard!

    • Karen Fayeth

      Scott – True, never boring. I was actually hyper-aware the whole time I was there. I was craning to hear what people were saying, taking in words and phrases and loving it all.

      Public transit is a weird and fascinating sociology study.

  • Ur bro

    It’s actually no waiting. No stopping is a red x in a red circle on a blue field…… But what the hell is the difference???

  • Frank Conway

    I like the posts you make out of nothing. Tapping into that rich vein of creativity of yours.

    Having written that (another nice thing about your writing is that you don’t use cliches like ‘having said that’ and cliche-like conventions like capitalizing words for EMPHASIS instead of learning how to write well or separating one sentence off into its own paragraph for no other reason than to make it really, really dramatic sounding all of which immensely bothers me, and having put that into symbols that others of my species can translate into thoughts I would have stood in front of that lady and snapped close ups of her until she moved goddamnit) I’ll have to come back later because I actually have things to do if you can believe that.

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