A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday, by Tim Roxborogh.
It's debatable if it's a true travel bug if it gives Planet Earth so much joy, but let's run with it: ridiculous signs. If you've done any travel in a country where English is not the primary language, you will have experienced the phenomenon of the sign that makes substantially less sense than it thinks. Sometimes the grammar is wrong, sometimes it's the spelling but just as good is when the grammar and spelling are fine but the message and tone have been lost a little in translation.
My favourites are generally the slightly aggressive ones telling you what you can and cannot do. I remember a hotel swimming pool sign in Cambodia that had giant painted bullet points of all the requirements of bathers, including one saying: "No pubic hair visible!" The letters were so large it almost looked like a billboard, but it's fair to say any such hairs were safely hidden during my dip.
Just the other day a Travel Bugs reader named Arran, who's a Kiwi expat living in Japan, sent me a photo of a warning sign from a train station. The sign lists all the prohibited behaviour in the station and makes the threat that any violations will result in PUNISHMENT. My word! The first three no-nos are fairly innocuous directives against selling goods, collecting signatures (presumably for petitions as opposed to autographs from celebs) and busking. But the fourth one is a doozy: "Anything that annoys people".
Ha! I love it. On the same sign that asserts these bullet points are "laws" not to be broken, they have something as wondrously vague as "Anything that annoys people". And fair enough, no one likes to be annoyed by fellow patrons of public transport, but quite whether being annoying would stand up in a court of law remains to be seen. You wouldn't read about it.
