Surreal Signs

The last three weeks have been photo hell. Although it doesn't feel like it, it's now rather shockingly over two years since I returned from my year of travels. Ever since arriving back, sorting through the travel pictures has been on the list of things to do but with thousands of them, I kept inevitably putting it off.

Having embraced the joys of discount sites like Groupon, I purchased some print albums to begin the daunting process of finally documenting my travels. I'd planned to sort through my pictures over a month before the deal ended but in reality started sifting through pictures a few weeks before and actually created the albums on-line on the last two days of the deal.

The website I was using reassuring said it would take between five to ten minutes to create an album. Try anywhere between five to eight hours! Just uploading the pictures took several hours alone and traffic on the site was so busy it took an hour and a half to pay for the second album. Of course there's all the fiddly nonsense like rotating pictures, getting them in the right order, labelling etc to be done too.

I finally finished and paid for the second album at 11.30 (half an hour before the deal ended) to discover I'd actually purchased three albums and had someone changed the figure to two in my head. Queue some frantic downloading and a 3am finish that ended happily with the Groupon code being accepted anyway.

Having finished the task, I thought I'd treat myself to the less arduous job of looking through my more recent holiday pictures from Budapest, Slovenia, Salzburg and Italy. I love a good sign and there are quite a few comical or frankly bizarre ones among my photos that I thought I'd share:

Budapest:

I just love the additional use of colour in this image from our hostel.

This place doesn't seem to understand that the real meaning of “Happy Ending” was widely recognised some time ago or perhaps they're merely trying to use it as their unique selling point?

You may wonder what's going on in this sign?

Then you see the next one that helpfully illustrates the service offered:

Slovenia:

I've always been amused by the randomness of Punkys in Indian restaurants but this Slovenian Pizzeria takes their plastic encased dessert collection to a whole new level.

I've no idea why this sign seems to suggest females are banned from holding hands with children along the footpath.

Or why this sign says it's OK for men to hold hands with children wearing hats resembling kites.

The existence of an erotic 3D cinema and shop in the tiny Slovenian town of Bled is a tad bizarre but one specialising in Avatar?!

Italy:

Is this finally recognising the snail's right of way on our roads?

We thought this might be prohibiting any skiing on the flower beds.

This sign is dually strange – one side seems to be encouraging dog golf while the other encourages walks with ghost dogs. Unfortunately the dwindling daylight hours means this picture is a tad on the dark side but the version with flash manages to somehow mask the strangeness of the right hand side of the sign.

Decide for yourself, what the “yes” and “no” on the toilet flushers are trying to say.