Doesn’t need comment, does it? Picture is worth n words.

This is a US fire hydrant, the kind I used to wonder at when watching (original US) Sesame Street on German TV as a kid:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

(Warning: 3 more pictures after the cut)

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Amersfoort railway station. One of several posts marking a bump in the floor (apparently the future location of the electronic ticket gates), the only one with a sign on it. According to Secunda, “perhaps it means ‘no lying on the floor with your arms and legs in the air’”.

When someone noticed it was amended to “3,50 each, 3 for 10” as originally intended. I don’t think anybody would have wanted to pay one euro for the privilege of buying three jars of honey at once.

A bit disturbing, too. This was on a children’s merry-go-round, of which the rest was decorated with cartoon characters that Disney, Warner Bros., Marvel et al. are unlikely ever to have seen royalties for:

Click the picture to enlarge.

The summer fair has long gone, fortunately, but the big sign with rules that graced all its obvious access points is still worth posting:

Let me draw attention to the most remarkable detail:

That’s not the Dutch spelling. The Dutch word for alcohol is “alcohol”.

I wonder if anybody took it literally and had a beer on the fairground without technically breaking the rules.

The Chinese shop sells this; it took me a while to realise that it doesn’t slime you for all it’s green.

It does help that there’s “Dieters’ drink” next to it— it’s unlikely that that’s the drink of some apparently German people called Dieter.

On one of the last days that the swimming pool was still open before they closed it for maintenance, I saw two unfamiliar birds in the road that was already closed for maintenance. Black and white, the size of a gull but slimmer, long red beak, aggressive movements, and when they saw me coming with the camera they flew away shouting “Peep! Ta-PEEP!”

We don’t seem to have a bird guide, and online taxonomy sites didn’t help much, but I think they were oystercatchers. There aren’t many oysters to be caught in our town (those at the restaurant across the road from our house have already been caught by someone else) but Wikipedia says “they breed far inland”. The map on that page shows them not quite so far to the east in the Netherlands, but the picture looks exactly like the birds I saw.

Outside the supermarket, a few meters to the side of the entrance, there was this puddle of red ink-like liquid. Surely it can’t all have come from the little container lying in it?

Nobody was paying any attention to it, and when I took four pictures from different sides nobody paid attention to me, as if the whole thing was invisible.

It was still flowing: in the first photo there isn’t any liquid in the crack between the tiles, and in the second there is.

My best guess is theatrical blood, but I’m open to suggestions.