I have three months before my next trip, but I’ve been itching to keep the blog momentum going after last month’s wonderful A&K journey to southeast Asia. (Antihistamines don’t help.) Hence today’s post, the first of three “travel musings” exploring some of the quirky joys of traveling. The first joy – in so many ways – is humor.
I’m easily amused. I find many things funny: wordplay, sight gags, weird juxtapositions, irony, impressions, and – especially when I’m traveling – signs.
English Abroad v. American English
Some signs make entirely proper use of English, but with wording that yields amusing double entendres for Americans (or at least this American – draw whatever conclusions you want about my mind).
Food: the Thought-Provoking, the Gross, and the Downright Alarming
Being a fan of food – I try to have some every day – I tend to notice odd, gross, thought-provoking, or otherwise entertaining signs relating to eating and drinking:
I shake my head (that’s SMH for you young folk) at their misunderstanding of food taxonomy. Everyone knows that ice cream is not a separate phylum of food, but merely one of the four food groups (along with pizza, chocolate, and fried bananas).
Here’s a related head-scratching classification:
The Czechs are known for their beer, which may have medicinal properties:
Monks have brewed beer forever; they were the original Brews Brothers. (Most nuns don’t – I guess it’s not habit-forming.) Still, I wonder what the Czech equivalent of the FDA makes of the branding. Is there a Fra of pharmacology? A Prior of psychiatry? An Abbott of attitude-adjustment?
OK, so that one is more bemusing than amusing. My musing is whether I found it funny because the only alternative would be to cry or possibly suffer a vicarious heart attack.
As typos go, this one is about as disastrous as it gets. Unless it’s not a typo and açaí bowels are a thing but most of them are unhealthy? I find it particularly astounding that they took such great care to use a “ç” and an “í” but didn’t happen to notice an extra “e”!
Signs That Make You Wanna Think
Some signs are inherently amusing, though I may have to tease out why in my own mind. For example:
The result of a mega-merger between General Mills and Amalgamated Leprechauns L.L.P. It’s great for withdrawing gold coins, but only if there’s a rainbow nearby.
Warning Signs: Comically Evocative to Horrifying
Several thousand miles apart, in Blenheim, New Zealand and Bangkok Thailand, I saw similar signs that seek to alarm but mostly amuse:
This one is deadly serious and raises some appallingly entertaining possibilities:
Blah, blah, blah … wait: Argentine ants sound bad enough, tangoing through my nightmares. But plague skinks? Is New Zealand holding out on us? I thought Australia was dangerous, with its swarms of poisonous spiders and snakes. But those are one and done – a single plague skink might take down an entire population! Bring back the moas!!
Bathroom Humor
Signs for bathrooms are a surprisingly untapped source of potential humor. Still, here are a couple that provoked a laugh (always a risk if you’re in dire need!).
Conclusion
Am I happy to be made happy by so little? You betcha, to quote one of a number of embarrassing candidates for higher office. As a recently departed bard sang, “if we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” So next time you change latitudes or longitudes, look for things that bring a smile to your face. For that matter, do the same at home!
Come back in around a month for an incisive post about … manhole covers. (This blog dives deep and isn’t afraid to get its figurative hands dirty!)
PuffinlessTravel 