late summer

To me, the term bank holiday always had a slightly absurd ring to it.  I understand Christmas and Easter, First of May and Independence Day.  Even Pioneer Day.  Why not commemorate the arrival of the first settlers in Utah, celebrate the delusion that turned a desert valley green?  But what is is about banks?  What have they done to deserve not just one but three holidays?  There's one early in May, a second one late in May and finally one at the end of August.  That one's popularly known as late summer bank holiday.

I'm sitting on a bus into town, on the upper deck but not in the first row.  There's room, but there's no point.  There's nothing to see.  Water washes down the front window in a flood, and only the driver downstairs has wipers.  It is August, but it doesn't feel like summer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I started listening to 2fm, an Irish pop station.  My stay in the Republic a few weeks ago got me into it.  It was the station we were listening to in the car.  Back in in London I started listening to it in the hope of catching the Irish farmers' road safety appeal again, to give my travel piece the authenticity that comes with getting detail right.  When this wasn't happening, I stuck around for the voices.  The Irish have their own way of speaking English, and it's very pleasing to my ears.  There's also a dash of disconnect that gives drab programs spice.  Words and meaning have different trajectories sometimes.  There was talk about the Rose of Tralee and much time spent on the hurling scores.  It was all done in flawless English, but I could make neither heads nor tails.  It's like a different country.

As I'm getting closer to town, the bus gets fuller, rescuing the unprepared from shelters by the road.  It's still raining.  The queues into the Natural History Museum are long and frayed like old rope.  The weather's wearing good manners thin.  It looks as if the most determined will get to see the dinosaurs first.

Last week there was a giveaway on 2fm that didn't seem quite right.  If you've turned the heat on this week, the radio host tempted, give us a call and tell us the story.  You could win a full tank of heating oil.  This was in August.  A woman called and said her living room was arctic.  It wasn't a joke.  Two days ago, Radio 4 reported Northern Ireland's overnight low with considerable incredulity.  It was -2°C.

The bus's side windows remain largely clear.  Outside, tourists scuttle through the dreariness of a day with no hope.  Traffic is denser than it should be on a public holiday.  The driver is not in a good mood.  He's honking his way through the jam with considerable irritation.

The seats in the front row are all taken now.  You can't visit London and not sit up front at least once.  It's part of the experience.  I hear American, Spanish and French voices.  The paths in Hyde Park glisten.  A few people walk colorful umbrellas.  Speakers' Corners is abandoned.  This is not a day to be outside.  I leave the bus at Oxford St.  The big Metro Bank, a tasteless aggregation of bright red and equally bright blue, is doing good business.

more signs

Fat drops are hitting the metal box underneath my window into which the internet café on the ground floor rolls its shutters when it's open.  The rain comes down at a sharp angle.  In the middle of August, this doesn't surprise anyone in London.  Summer is relative.

Last weekend, I went away for four days, the closest to a summer vacation I will take this year.  My destination was Ireland.  I went in full possession of my senses.  A longer account of the time spent there will soon appear on my website.  Here, I want to revisit a topic that fascinated me the last time I was in Ireland, a few months ago.

Ireland has some of the most hilarious signage I've ever seen, what with no removal of rocks from the beach warnings or mind the step signs in Braille.  My friend had later sent me a find he had made while getting on the train in Dublin.  Under a printed "Days without accident" by the ticket barrier someone had proudly scrawled a big 1 – not exactly something I would advertise to my customers.

My recent trip to the west coast didn't offer the same rich pickings in that regard.  There was a post with three highly creative signs that, once you'd interpreted their unusual nature, might have warned of the dangers of the sea.  The bottom one agreed most with that interpretation.  Rather conventional, it showed a crossed-out diver about to hit the water.  The middle sign was harder to read, but became clear together with the one below.  What looks like deep pools, the sign seemed to say, might have submerged rocks protruding that are invisible from above.  If you jump you might hit them and get hurt.  That's a long message for one sign to convey.

The sign at the top showed a stick figure bodysurfing a mighty wave.  There seemed to be more excitement than danger in this sign, and I started to reassess my initial interpretation.  Maybe the signs weren't warnings at all but invitations?  Next to the post, a narrow trail led into the cliff.  At the end of it someone had installed a competition diving board on top of a proper concrete foundation.  A local business sponsored the operation.  It's name was on the diving board in capital letters.  There was no more talk of submerged rocks, though with the tide out they were clearly visible below.

The sign I liked best was leaning against a shopfront in Limerick.  J.T.Spratt's advertised washed roosters, ten kilograms for only €3.99.  The shop was closed and its shutters drawn.  I was left with many questions.  Was the business selling washed roosters or offering a washing service?  How do roosters react to being washed?  Why would you want your rooster washed in the first place?

"Do you have dirty cocks?" – "No, we have washed roosters."

There was no one to answer these questions.  We continued our walk on King's Island, increasingly hastily, as heavy clouds bunched up above us.  Three days of summer had come to an end.  Before long, we hit the motorway east, hydroplaning back to Dublin through rainbows, sun and storm.

masterclass

Yesterday after work I went up to Kensington High St to unwind – have a coffee maybe or a drink and spend insane for half a burlap sack of groceries at Whole Foods, every aspiring epicure's first port of call.  The air was hot after yet another week of un-English summer and with a protest march in full swing.  Fists, slogans and shouts rose where the usual disturbance is Lamborghinis accelerating out of the Royal Garden Hotel.

This is not a place for protests.  Nothing kills prime real estate like noise and masses of common people.  But it wasn't the first protest down that street.  Fridays are for marches, ever since Gaza exploded, the numbers of protesters swelling with the body count.  I had forgotten about this and now wondered whether I'd get through at all.  The T.K. Maxx on the other side of the street seemed a world away.

The protest wasn't a march anymore.  It had come to a halt as close to the Israeli embassy as possible, not threateningly close in other words but probably in shouting distance.  The embassy sits in Kensington Palace Gardens, together with many other embassies and assorted billionaires' mansions.  Lakshmi Mittal has a second home there, as does the Sultan of Brunei.  The street itself is owned by Her Majesty – who locks the gates when things might just get out of hand a little.  It was probably at the southern gate that the speeches were made, out of my sight but within earshot.

It was it this point that I wanted to intertwine my own thoughts on the conflict, but I find this impossible to do in a coherent and balanced way.  I would never broach the subject with Israeli friends.  It's easy to dismiss what's unacceptable when you're not always on the lookout for rockets, when you didn't grow up with suicide attacks.

But I have to write something because I don't understand.  When rooting out terror is your objective, killing children and bombing homes seems a questionable strategy.  If it weren't a hundred times more powerful, the response would mirror the terror that triggered it.  It could be read as a legitimization of the means, and the last thing Hamas needs is encouragement.  If you know the enemy takes civilians as shields, you can either not care about life or adapt your approach.

The protest didn't address these issues.  It didn't present solutions either.  The protest was a gathering of like-minded people, a demonstration of dissatisfaction with something out of control.  It was ill-focused and inconsequential and wonderfully epitomized by the Stop the War Coalition whose signs were everywhere.  I couldn't figure out whether they were a coalition to stop the war or whether the War Coalition needed stopping.

It easy to be a cynic.  There's incredible suffering all around.  Hotspots flare up periodically, if not regularly.  You can read, discuss, raise your passions, fight – live active democracy, if you will – and nothing will change.  Or you can close your eyes and enjoy the benefits of living in a democracy:  pretend that sun and the sales and your salary are all that matters.  I know what the right approach is, but conscious powerlessness is hard to endure.

I went into Uniqlo to buy pajamas.  The air conditioning was turned up so high that I almost froze solid.  Outside the fight continued.  Ill-defined fundraisers sold Palestinian flags, sweatshop-made somewhere in Asia, for five quid.  Socialist workers paraded placards that mostly advertised themselves.  The call for the death of Israel was verbal only, from a man with a megaphone whose accent clearly identified him as a disinterested party.  He didn't draw a crowd.

idiots abroad

The other day, there was a story in the Evening Standard of a woman traveling on her daughter's passport.  She had taken it by accident from the pile in her house.  The woman looked nothing like a her daughter, but she made it down to Spain with no troubles at all.  She had a blast, the story went, but on the way back, airport security didn't let her pass.  Her error was discovered, and she was denied boarding.  Somehow she obtained valid papers and made it back to the UK a few flights later, but she paid dearly for the service.  This wouldn't be a story, had the woman not made it one.  Upon discovering that stupidity costs, she bitched and moaned in public instead of just quietly paying up and learning a lesson.

I hate people like that, people with a false sense of entitlement, with the conviction that the world revolves around them, where any mistake is someone else's.  Plus I hate travel rookies, people who don't know what it takes to move smoothly in a world of transcontinental mobility.

When the automated passport gate in Frankfurt flagged up my biometric chip the other day, I blamed it on the box.  The name scanned all right, as did the photo.  Surely the chip was just a read issue.  I removed my passport from the scanner to give it a wipe and start the process again.  Before reinserting it, I had a good look.  I was surprised.  I looked young.  The passport was eight years expired.  My current passport, still good for a year and a half, was back home in London.

Getting on the plane had been no problem at all.  In Heathrow, no ID is required to enter the terminal or clear security.  A boarding pass is enough.  One has to register travel documents before checking in online, but they aren't verified.  A big deal is made about showing identification before boarding but again, the documents aren't checked properly.  My face aged out of matching the photo in my expired passport a long time ago, but that was no impediment to boarding.  As long as the name on the boarding pass matches the ID, anyone can board a plane.

This is how I got to Frankfurt.  As I stepped away from the antagonistic machine, my stomach dropped.  I was in a familiar place but in uncharted waters.  How do you travel without valid documents?  How would my journey continue, and where?  I decided to take a chance on an overworked border agent, crossing the border as if nothing had happened.  The man was rather alert.  "This passport is expired", he announced calmly.  There was no alarm in his voice.

I dithered for a second, unsure what to say, when his colleague next door leaned over for advice.  He held up a Chinese passport in an irregular situation.  The owner looked on in some confusion.  Her passport contained a British visa that was all good.  Another one was needed for Germany because the Brits never joined Schengen.  Problem was the German visa was only valid from September.  "What do I do with her?"  my border agent's colleague asked.  The only correct answer was, "You have to send her back."  It came without hesitation or feeling.

This did nothing to comfort me.  "Is it?", I asked.  My head was empty of rational thoughts, their place taken by increasingly colorful worst-case scenarios.  "Yes", he said, all business.  "Can I see it, please?" I asked.  I couldn't come up with anything better to say.  I had a job interview scheduled for the next day and I really needed to enter the country, but I could see that these were not reasons to further my cause.

I needn't have worried.  Had I been thinking clearly I would have realized that was nothing to worry about.  They wouldn't send me back to London, deport me, whatever.  Because once back in London Her Majesty's border force would have send me straight back to Germany because I didn't have documents to enter the UK.  It was unlikely I would become a international ping-pong ball, forever trapped in transit between countries that denied me, and I didn't.  The border agent asked to see another form of identification.  I showed him my driver's license and was on my way.

The first hurdle cleared, the next loomed even taller.  My flight back to the UK was on Monday morning.  It was now Thursday night.  The interview would be on Friday.  How to get my situation sorted?  I must have been near despair because I did something I don't normally do.  I asked for help – and was sent to the Federal Police, their office just next to the terminal entrance.

Two officers exited as I approached.  Over the next five minutes, one of them enumerated in great detail the options available to me.  It seemed simple – and not out of the ordinary at all.  "Go to Municipal Services and they'll sort you out", he said.  "If that fails, go to the Frankfurt office early on Monday morning.  They're used to this.  And if that fails as well, the guys here will help you as a last resort, though you might have to pay a fine because you're passport is so old."  Full of useful information, I rushed from the airport to the station.  I caught, with five minutes to spare, the train I had originally planned to take.  There was even time to buy a ticket.

The next morning at five to eight, I was in front of Municipal Services, willing the clock to advance.  In Germany, you have to be registered in your home town.  Where you're registered defines your home town.  All administrative business, driver's licenses, passports, IDs, must be done in your home town.   Where I was that morning, in Heidelberg, I was not a resident.  Would they be able to help me out?  And how long would it take?

The answer to the second question was half an hour.  This included time spent in the photo booth in the building lobby to have a set of mugs shot.  It also included a bit of a palaver when the requested fax arrived from my home town.  It declared that I was without fixed abode.  When my mom had moved in February, I had failed to notify the authorities of the change in address.  They had somehow found out, maybe when they started razing the building where my mom had lived and I used to be registered, and struck me from their files.

The administrator in Heidelberg was unconcerned.  "This happens all the time", she said.  My temporary ID was already printing.  "If you could just fill in this form here.  It will formally deregister you and make everyone happy."

I was happy and relieved beyond words when I sauntered out moments later into morning air that was still fresh from the night.  My job interview was ninety minutes and only a tram ride away.  I was officially homeless but in possession of a valid ID again.

public viewing

Last night I took a beer shower.  It was three minutes into the game and England had just scored a goal.  People around me screamed, jumped and waved their full glasses.  I got soaked.  After the spray had settled, the score was still 0:0.  When the Italians farther back in the pub realized that, half a minute later, they erupted into cheers of their own, celebrating the hypothetical equalizer after England's goal that wasn't.  No beer reached me this time, or maybe none was thrown.

Watching England play with English supporters in a crowded pub late at night was not a pleasant experience.  The game had started at 11 and a large part of the audience seemed to have prepared by binging on ale all evening.  The game began optimistic enough, with singing and hoping, but the atmosphere soon degraded into something vaguely rowdy.  England isn't supposed to win in World Cup finals, but the self-deprecating humor that this country does so well was missing from the spectators' perspective.

The night before, in another pub, things had been different.  The Goose is not a sports bar.  It's a regulars' local, with carpets and cheap food, that even spiffed up after recent remodeling retains an air of home away from home.  The Goose shows the games, but it seems as if many customers don't come to watch them.  They sit there having dinner or a drink and chat with friends.  Overhead, the TV's on, but that's just a distraction.

I was having dinner and a drink with a friend, but we had also come to watch the game.  It could have been a quiet night, had it not been for the large group in orange that clustered near the entrance door.  When Holland scored goal after goal against a shockingly lethargic Spanish team they got more and more noisy.

After the game, karaoke started.  The World Cup doesn't break Friday night traditions at The Goose.  Exuberant men head to toes in orange don't normally feature, but they're easily absorbed.  I know it's unfair the compare the behavior of supporters of a winning team with those of a losing team, but the Dutch were a rather enjoyable bunch, never mind their competitive drinking.

From the small to the big, why are we watching football in pubs in the first place?  In Germany, big screens are erected all over big cities.  People gather from all over to watch together.  The German term for this is "public viewing", as if it were something imported.  The friend who visited me this weekend ask where we'd watch the games, expecting something like "by the Thames" or "on Leicester Square".  He was disappointed that no such showings exist in London.

I told him, half in jest, that it wouldn't work, that English supporters drink too much and get too rowdy, that their doomed passions couldn't be contained if thousands were gathered.  The truth is probably that the pub owners who already operate in a rather dense marketplace, see the World Cup as theirs and wouldn't want competition to spoils the takings.

The Famous 3 Kings where I saw England fall to Italy certainly makes a roaring trade during big games.  Last night it was so busy that everyone through the door got a stamp on their hand and only those with a stamped hand were allowed reentry after the smoke-and-fresh-air break at half time.  They sold their beer as fast as they could.  There was never any slack on the bars.

For me, this works as well.  I'll be back to see the Argies in an hour and for most of games afterwards.  I want to watch in a crowd, with shared emotions and the energy of something important.  But it needs to be contained.  A hundred drunks, with superfluous beer showers, groping and stomping on feet, is all I can take.

transport for London

This afternoon, after abandoning the idea of a pub lunch that had been high up on the agenda until time started to crawl while the clock hands raced, I had a coffee and a carrot cake and poked around my mailbox a bit.  I was out in the sticks, in clear view of ambitious vegetation and falcons hunting in packs, but there was internet.  You can't escape it these days, it seems.

An email from noresponse@cclondon.com stopped me cold.  It asked me, the "Dear Customer", to "Please open the attached file to view correspondence from Transport for London".  The subject line was "Email from Transport for London".  Does that sound dodgy, or what?  I have one reason to correspond with Transport for London, but that correspondence hasn't been sent yet.

The unsent correspondence concerns Jane, TfL employee and member of the station staff at West Brompton tube station.  Last weekend, with a friend in tow, I had got special-fare tickets to go down to the coast.  It was supposed to be a sunny weekend, an entire summer in two days.  The tickets were for Southern, printed paper incompatible with TfL's touchcard system.

We wanted to get on at West Brompton.  I had picked an all-Southern itinerary and wasn't concerned at all.  With my cheery sunny Sunday morning face, I approached the ticket window.  "Could you please let us through?  We got these Downlander tickets?" I asked.  "No", came the curt reply.  There was no smile.  The woman was not happy.

I tried again, "Look, this is a ticket for Southern for today.  Our train leaves in five minutes."  I threaded the folded paper through the hole in the glass.  The woman studied it for a while, then shoved it back.  "To me, this is not a ticket.  This is a piece of paper."  That's when I wrote Jane's name down.  This will not go unpunished, I thought.

First was the matter of the train, though.  Faced with two options, I gave up on principle (jumping the gate with a finger in Jane's face) and did the deed of the meek, using my Oyster Card for the first part of the journey, effectively rewarding TfL for awful customer service.  My only consolation was that I'd get back to them with an inspired rant to the Complaints Department, and hopefully be reimbursed.

Ten days later, the complaint still waits to be written, which is why I was rather surprised to see an email purporting to be from TfL.  The invitation-to-click was signed "Business Operations Customer Service Representative", as if this meant anything.  To me the whole thing screamed Nigerian inheritance scam or maybe Russian spybot, depending on the content of the attached file.  I didn't open it but navigated to the sender's website to learn more.

Turns out that cclondon.com is the home of the congestion charge, which is administered by TfL.  Things fit, all of a sudden.  The sticks I was in was Oxford.  I had come to pick up kit to be moved to Imperial.  I had rented a van in the morning and paid ten quid for the privilege of later driving into Central London.  The email was indeed for me.  It contained my receipt – and quite a bit of material for a critical assessment of TfL's customer focus.

In Brugge

Belgium is an absurd country.  This statement is as good as any to resuscitate a moribund blog, maybe better.  It seems to come out of nowhere, spiteful and inexcusable, but was chosen with care.  It will turn out to relate to the unfolding post and, by doing so, recall one of the main themes of this blog.  Last Friday evening in a Eurostar somewhere under the Channel, I remembered that sentence as the beginning of a Streiflicht column in the Süddeutsche many years ago.

The Süddeutsche is a serious newspaper, Germany's best, a quality daily in the lingo of the trade.  The Streiflicht, on the left side of the front page, above the fold and just below the masthead, is a comment on one bit of the day's news, somewhere between humorous and satirical but never malicious.  Belgium has its bit of daily news, but I don't remember what triggered that particular column.  I had laughed hard and clipped the column from the paper.  Since then, most associations with Belgium have been purged from my brain.  Now all I can think of is cherry beer.  (The post could end here, having neatly made it back to the first line.)

My preparation for the trip that started on Friday consisted almost exclusively of imagining things and trying to remember what I had once heard or read.  It didn't come to much.  There was a Scientific American article on Lambic beer when I was in college, but that's not at my fingertips anymore.  A week or so before departure and increasingly lost, I went out to buy a film that appeared to have been issued by the local tourist office.  It was a bit of a scam.

In Bruges provided much factual information on the prevalence of cobbled streets and lovely canals roamed by swans, of brick houses half as old as time itself and soaring gothic monuments, romantic enough to make you cry, and featured the belfry in all its splendid octagonality.  But it also contained a joke about chocolate and murderous child molestation and had an elderly gentleman hurl himself off said belfry and land with a thud of crushed bones on the town's market square, next to tourists halfway through their comprehensive beer sampler, cherry, Trappist and all.

Late at night I was sitting underneath the belfry and had a beer.  It was not a cherry beer, and no one crash-landed on the cobbled ground.  The belfry had long closed for the night.  The beer was a bit frustrating.  I could only get taster sizes, chosen from what seemed like 178 varieties.  Being German I prefer a simple beer in a big glass.  But this was Belgium.  Sample sizes kept appearing on my table, the liquid evaporating faster than I could sip the foam off the top.

In Brussels earlier in the evening, announcements were made in three languages, here transcribed into a fourth.  "For trains to Holland, take platform three.  For Germany, press 5.  If you want to stay in Belgium, please hang up now." My connection was half an hour off.  As I ambled by the departure displays with no rush whatsoever, I realized that the earlier train was five minutes late and made connection with a nominal gap of zero (being luckier than Flucha who had to do an overnight pitstop in Frankfurt because for her seven minutes weren't enough).

On the market underneath the belfry, the good vibes lasted long past midnight.  It was mild, almost seasonal, and chatter wafted from table to table.  I learned that hello is Flemish for hello and that swearing in Mexican gets you a cheap beer.  I also learned that cheese as a snack is best consumed dipped into thick mustard.  Before, this would have struck me as absurd, but it went down a treat, one of many oddities we would encounter and enjoy over the weekend.

signs

Sometimes I think a smartphone would make my life easier, keeping information at my fingertips at all times.  Sometimes information is all I need.  Monday morning, for example, yesterday, to be precise.  I found myself in a comfortable chair at a table with an enviable view, in front of me a delightfully presented breakfast.  It could have been so much better.

It would have been better, had I known the departure time of my flight back to London before setting off to the airport.  Had I known that, I would have still been in bed by the time thoughts about non-existing smartphones and breakfasts soon to vanish started swirling around my head.  It was not even seven; I was two hours early.

Two and a half days before that, I had arrived in Dublin and picked up a car in a convoluted procedure that might have owed something to the city's experience in the bubble before the recent bust.  My credit card was leveraged 40 times the rental value, with promises that I'd be a happy man when the chips were counted three days hence.  It was a frightening sum to sign over, however temporarily.

The most striking thing on the drive into town were the traffic lights.  Every single one was red, an engineering marvel for sure, an accomplishment not unlike free traffic flow throughout, but diametrically opposed in its effect.  Getting to my friend's house took three times longer than Aunt Google had promised.

Driving in the Pale the next two days showed traffic organization to be serious problem in Ireland.  Road signage is exceptionally poor.  Often, it is absent entirely and one has to guess directions.  Kids might not remember, but without a telephone of recent incarnation tethered to a satellite, this is difficult.  After encountering a sign for Wicklow where we were headed on Saturday, there were half a dozen intersections where it didn't feature.  I picked turns with intuition as my only guide.

At other times, signs were ambiguous or outright misleading.  On the road back from the Wicklow Mountains, after a hike up what can only be described as a hill with aspirations – dark, brooding and substantially more desolate than its height warranted – there were no signs for Dublin at all.  I understand that all roads in Ireland lead there eventually, but a clueless tourist would appreciate a bit more orientation.  Every exit advertised a local place name and An Lár, a phrase I had interpreted as Gaelic for city center on my drive from the airport the night before when I missed a postcard-sized sign with the same five letters and gone wrong for the first time.

After a dozen An Lárs, with a toll road into hostile territory looming ahead, we couldn't avoid getting off the motorway.  No idea where we were, but we had widely overshot Dublin without ever seeing evidence of its existence from the car.  It is possible that An Lár doesn't refer to generic city centers but only to Dublin's.  How would I know?  Returning from a day out on bikes the next day, things went better until a tunnel to the port was announced and a toll plaza threatened with fees to pay.  There was a road around it, the road downtown that we were not only after but already on, but it was perfectly camouflaged and it took the courage of the desperate to take it.

It was at this point that I came up with a theory.  I was reminded of Iceland where farm gates all over have to remain open to give free passage to huldufólk, elves whose traditional life and charitable business must not be impeded.  Ireland has leprechauns, but they are not considered unequivocally good.  Maybe the road sign confusion is meant to send them astray.  Alternatively, it could be designed to bamboozle tourists like me.  Most likely, it's simply negligence.

The most outrageous signs weren't road signs at all.  In Bray, a quiet place by the sea that avoids most of the traps English seaside towns inevitably fall into, there were stern warnings against the removal of stones from the beach.  Usually, towns by the sea advertise their fine sand.  Bray is proud and possessive of its vast expanse of pebbles and rocks, the sand buried safely underneath.

Beach pride

On Sunday, we went mountain biking.  We rented hard tails so fresh they still smelled of paint and lungbusted our way up a fire road that spilled us onto a system of trails engineered into the hill by someone with a fine touch for such things.  The trails were single track for the most part, closed to hikers and to be ridden in one direction only.  The climb was a pain, but the hour-long downhill – technical, rocky, twisty and so tight in parts that my shoulder still hurts from grazing trees – was epic.

In the lobby to the trailhead café was a bright yellow Mind the step sign with an explicit pictogram and Braille dots underneath.  My senses blunted by what we had experienced so far, the idiocy took a moment to register.  But unless there is an internationally agreed standard for where to place warning signs for the blind, Braille isn't of much use when the only cue is visual.

My friend attempted a second lap after our pit stop; I only made it up the fire road and decided to call it a day.  Years of long-distance running have atrophied my leg muscles to strings.  There was nothing left to do the downhill safely.  Not much had returned the next morning, which is why was happy to sit and have breakfast after walking, painful walking, through airport security and then towards my gate.  A break was a good way to start the day.  Smartphones be damned.