Tourist Lint

Churches! Castles! Museums! Historical Artifacts!

We traveled. As mentioned "yesterday," we took a trip to Europe, a major continent with many, many countries. Each sports its own churches, castles, museums, and historical artifacts. Europe is overrun and greatly burdened with history, almost all of which you can discover from guidebooks. While the books lack the tactile impact of metre-thick castle walls or the gravitas of statues of saints and conquerers, the guidebooks do provide photographs, most far more professional than those I can provide here. And many have the benefit of research, as opposed to a time-hazed memory of the words of a distracted guide. So, despite last year's excursion into the Elliptical Church in Italy, interesting in large part due to its geometry and strain-gauge science project, I'm hoping this year to eschew excessive tourist fare. Rather, I plan to elucidate some Quirks of EU from my viewpoint.

I'm Hardly an Expert

I'm hardly an experienced world traveler! I bet EU has even more quirks than those described below. And my passport isn't even close to expiry.

My Goofy but Mostly Harmless Hobby—Vanity Plates

I do a lot of walking, and, even though I'm not a teenager, I inevitably carry my cellphone/camera with me. For entertainment, I photograph vanity license plates, usually parked, occasionally on the hoof*. I've been doing this for years, and sometimes capture really clever ones, such as 377OHMS

Nice, and especially Prague, are "walking cities" as we were both told and discovered on our own. But there wasn't a vanity license plate to be seen! Neither do I recall any on other trips. Come on EU, Don't you know what a lucrative government scam they can be? At least in Arizona, we pay $25 per year just to keep our vanity plate! Free money for the government! And entertainment for at least this tourist.

And Where Aren't those Nonexistent Vanity Plates?

On the not-quite-mighty Prius. It took me days in Nice and additional days in Prague to notice what appeared to be a total lack of the Toyota Prius on the streets. Really. I'm somewhat attuned to that model, having owned at least one since 2005, and I did not see a single one in either city. Just now, no longer able to contain my puzzlement, I checked Google for the reason, and was informed that "Toyota Prius tops list of most stolen car model in France in 2021." Given the contradiction between that article and my own observation, I came to the logical (and surely wrong) conclusion the the few Prii that must have been there was each stolen multiple times.

Ow! Ow! Ow! The French Riviera! Ow! Ow! Ow!

Strangely believe it, until this trip I had never gone for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea. Wanting to repair that omission, I spent a few hours at the 'beach'. Most likely you are familiar with beaches. Almost by definition, they comprise an expanse of sand bordering on water. Swimming, depending on the temperature and the nature of the body of water, requires a transition involving anything from wading to running and diving, with the occasional onomotopoetic verbalization of being cold. But not in Nice! Here, the beach itself comprised pre-sand, i.e., rocks. Fortunately not boulders, but rather landscaping rocks such as are found in 50-pound sacks at Home Depot. I believe they qualify as rocks, not pebbles, although I'm sure there was some pebble representation**.

While I generally consider myself to have tough footsies, getting into the Med required much more than the usual fortitude, along with the repetitive English representation of pain. No idea how they say it in French. At least the water itself was pleasant; the waves were minimal and largely due to boat wakes rather than offshore meteorology.

The Buckethead Cellphone Meme?

Having never been to the Riviera, we thought that a tour of the area would be a worthwhile introduction. Churches! Museums! Fortifications! Yachts! And the Buckethead Cellphone guy on a bench. Walking around the port at Antibes with the guide, we came upon this unusual (to us), lifesize metal figure. (We think the cigarettes in his lap were an ad hoc comment by an EU person***, although it's hard to interpret.) Is this whimsy? A statement about how the cellphone blinds one to the outside world? A desperate attempt to dispose of many kilograms of base metal in an unobtrusive way, or even a dead drop for spies? The red Buckethead Guy partly answers the question. A few days later he was spied in an art gallery in St. Paul de Vence, an area filled with art galleries, some of which were quirky indeed. If something is in an art gallery, it's an art. So, therefore, must also be the guy on the bench. Two exemplars do not a meme make, but I'm sure only our lack of diligence prevented further sightings.

The EU is Very Protective of Consumer and Citizen Privacy

So protective that browsing the internet is an exercise in cookie rejection, something at which I have little skill. Every time you go to a web site, the information you want is covered by a large, tedious declaration that "this site uses cookies" and the opportunity to accept them or curate which ones you are willing to accept and reject the others. I'm sure EU denizens are used to this time-wasting ritual by now, but it bothered my temporally parsimonious self. There never seemed to be either an option to dismiss the inquiry or default one's browser to never seeing it. Thank you, Eurocrats.

Some day I shall also deliver myself of a rant about HIPAA..

Words I Liked

EU is filled with different languages. I am a native speaker (and, arguably, writer) of English, and as the joke goes, I'm an American****. This doesn't prevent me from appreciating other languages, however. Did you know that the French word for "heat wave" is canicule? That at least one ATM in Prague is a geldautomat? That the Russian word for "painter" is Xoodozhnik? A "wrist-watch" in the Czech republic is a hodinki? (Which sort of explains the collectors-site name, about which I had wondered.) And if you only speak English, you may be reluctant to brave a fish shop in France.

Enough?

For today, yes, But I'm not out of EU quirks and observations, and my blog "tomorrow" will pick up where this left off. And it will be totally castle- and church-free.

* Which is why it's "mostly harmless." I can be a bit reckless when I see a good one driving away.
** While I am not exactly an authority on geology, I have acquired some knowledge of the rock-pebble divide.
*** An invidious assumption. Even EU persons don't smoke as much as I used to believe they did.
**** The joke: What do you call someone who speaks three languages? "Trilingual." Two languages? "Bilingual." One language? "An American."

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