It's a sign

I've had a few observations over the last couple of weeks, I guess increasingly so over the last week as I've moved from the relative familiarity of Austria. A lot of it's came from seeing signs and stickers and others from just thinking as I go. Ill note a few of them underneath;

In Austria there was a poster on the sign of a council gardening truck with a lovely wee picture of a dog and beside it was the phrase geld scheisser. Seems like a stark warning for you to pick up your dogs leftovers (geld means money and I'll let you guess what the other word means). Also close to the park was a sticker on a car noting "Glock - the safe pistol", so I'll get this right at some point but I'm not convinced that guns are necessarily all that safe.

There's a consistent sign across all of Europe so far with a blue square, inside a white triangle and a pedestrian crossing. Again in Austria there's a version of it which looks horribly like Michael Jackson dragging a child, bizarre. In Hungary there's three different versions of it, without Michael, and as you go there seems to be different versions of similar signs with varying levels of detail showing different shorts, hairdoos, hats, shapes of cows horns and so on. There's a refreshing uniformity about the UKs road signage and sign placing.

That's not the only thing that changes as you go. Although I've experienced what seems to be variations on different types of European landscape as I've taken these short steps there are others, from the remarkably good road surfaces in Romania to the markedly worse ones in Bulgaria, to Germany where it seems almost impossible to get yourself more than five miles away from a motorway.

Within cities the theme continues, Switzerland and Austria are almost too picture postcard perfect while France has a rustic charm and what I experienced of Romania was really just quite run down concrete blocks. Meanwhile Bulgaria (what I've experienced so far) is a little rough and ready, with it's own share of concrete, but has a sense of realism about it that I quite like. Oh and then the new money and amazing holiday developments popping up along the Black Sea coast.

On the topic of the Soviets, I never paid attention to it while working in Baku a few years ago but it's something I've picked up on in the last week. It's easy to think that the concrete blocks are nasty and faceless but they are often not simply square blocks, there's a variety of shapes and forms which is often repeated town to town but the variety in any given street is there. They were often also built so that every apartment had a balcony so each one had it's own little bit of outside space but what has struck me the most is the grand avenues created, so many wide open streets, leading onto other grand wide streets creating a sense of airiness. It's just a shame that so many of them have been left to rot like so many derelict factories on the outskirts of town

There's more to see as well, tomorrow brings Istanbul into my sights. Looking forward to a few days there, to having one foot in Europe and the other in Asia. I get the feeling I'll have my senses assaulted there and looking forward to taking it all in.

One final point for this posting is how easy travel is nowadays. I've never (so far) had it hard. I've driven from the UK to Bulgaria, been stopped on the way into Romania to have my passport checked, and on the way out to have the passport and bikes V5 checked. There's been absolutely nobody else at any other point to pay attention to me and I have not one single extra stamp in the passport. Makes for very easy travel but seems strange to cover so much ground so anonymously and the Euro up to Romania just helps that strange feeling too.

Location:ул. Оборище,Burgas,Bulgaria