I said I’d post pictures. I am now posting pictures. This demonstrates what a good and trustworthy individual I am, no?

Apparently France is stalking me:

Ooh hey, isn’t this an esthetically pleasing building, in a low-key kinda way?

This would be Oxford:

The Oxford Tube shuttle-bus thing is very convenient, plenty of easy-to-get-to stops in London. Very comfortable. Also a victim of a peculiar procedural idiocy: the drivers don’t open the doors by default when they stop; they only open if someone’s waiting, or if you ask them to. There is no stop-requesting button system. You’re not supposed to be up near the front while the bus is in motion. So this means you have to get up as soon as the bus stops and dash for the front so that the driver knows you’re actually getting off. Which is a lot of fun when you’re in a new town and there’s a bunch of buses in front of you and you’re not sure if the driver has actually stopped-stopped, or is about to move forward, or what. The London Tube, for the record, has the opposite problem. Stops are announced ahead of time, doors open automatically (unlike the Paris Métro), but the interior is not comfortable at all. All right, the seats are nice, but as with most subway systems you’re likely to end up standing. The aisle between seats is narrow, the doors are small, and the ceiling of the cars curves down rather sharply; while the middle is, I’d guess, between 6’4″ and 6’6″, the sides are easily under 6′. This means that I had the pleasure of getting crammed against a low, curved wall for most of my trips, often having to push my way through a dense crowd to get to the minuscule door on the other side. I don’t think there’s hope of enlarging the trains in the near future, since the tunnels seem to fit them pretty snugly, but at least they could fit them with bigger doors and smaller, bench-style seats so people can at least move around.

Anyway.

I don’t know what the naked rusting person is doing up here, but there you go:

Amusing faces:

Dorms, if I recall?

Interesting tower-thingy:

Well hey, if it isn’t all architecturally juxtapositional:

London has these signs all over. They either mean “No Left Turn” or “Boomerangs Prohibited.”

These markings are nice, but they really confused me:

First, of course, I’m used to places where people don’t drive on the wrong side of the road. Then I see “Look Right,” and my brain is going “no, US driving is on the right,” and anyway I’m used to NYC “One Way” signs and reflexively look the way the arrow isn’t pointing, and I see “Look Left” across the street and end up hopelessly, utterly confused, whipping my head back and forth a half-dozen times before I start crossing. Also, pedestrian traffic signals are somewhat rare in London, and crosswalks are badly marked (often just a couple dashed lines).

I had to go on Wikipedia to find out what “Franked Mail” is. The article was too boring, though, and seemed like it would require work to suss out the exact details of the difference as used in the UK. I include the link here for the sake of completion only.

Pay-by-phone parking! Innat clever?

Some park or other. Reminds me of the stuff by the Seine and Central Park.

Yes, they got so desperate for names that they started calling streets after building materials:

Doesn’t this just make you want to chain up a unicycle and a tricycle and then argue with them when they come to take them away?

Sadly, some UK phonebooths are just dull:

In the US, we don’t bother with signs like these. We just let the tourists stand up on the double-decker buses and see what happens.

Another rusty naked person!

You know what this reminds me of? The penultimate episode of the second series of the new Doctor Who, when the Cybermen’s transdimensional imprint thingies are just standing around waiting to materialize and invade. Maybe because seeing Star Trek had already put me in a knowingly-silly same-show-as-forty-years-ago-but-with-a-real-special-effects-budget sci-fi mood.

Okay, this is actually even grammatically correct in American English, but it still sounds silly. Who startled the poor scaffolding?

A lot of signage in the UK is much chattier in diction than in the US. They don’t have many “exits”:

And they don’t “yield” the road:

Their equivalent to “If You See Something, Say Something.” Rather minimalist, semi-abstract, Modernist quality to it:

A London public toilet. Apparently, restrooms in the UK are important enough to get coats of arms on them:

Contrast the French approach:

There will follow, at some point, lovely pictures of various artistic stuff seen around London.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.