Crossing The Icy Waters

Inspired by a post by DaleF about cars crossing the frozen lake near where she lives, I looked up a photo I had noticed in Google Earth. It is the one below, showing a river crossing with no fewer than 8 traffic signs, all of which make perfect sense. The most obvious one is the blue one in Cyrillic letters saying that this is the river Pechora. Then there is the roman-lettered international STOP sign.

I wonder if my fellow bloggers will work out what the other signs mean...


Of the remaining six signs one seems to be redundant and another one only applies outside the winter season.
Have fun puzzling!

PS I found the original post here

Like mustard after the meal

I know it's been two weeks now since we dashed over to Paris to see MargieCM and her wonderful bunch. Two weeks can look like an eternity, especially after VallyP posted her report the moment we got off the train in Rotterdam (next time wait until we're home safe and sound, ok?).

As usual I got distracted by all sorts of things, but at last here are some pictures I took in Paris.
So now that the meal is over, here is my mustard.
Val's posted the pictures with wonderful people on them, so I am free to do the views of buildings and -of course- canals.

Let's begin with a panoramic view from the window of the appartement they'd rented not too far from the Place des Vosges.



Then 4 images from the Canal St-Martin, a real navigable canal through the city. This area is something I discovered when I was 17. Since then, others have discovered it as well - to my regret, but then I can't blame them. The area is just magical, especially the parts you don't see, because over a distance of 2.2km / 1.4M, the canal is invisible from above. On top there is a boulevard where people from the neighbourhood go for a stroll, meet acquaintances and play pétanque.

As it is hard to produce images of the invisible, here are a few from the canal where it is visible to the naked eye.

You need to row with the oars you have

The above title is a standing expression in my mother tongue, Dutch. It is a 'watery way' from a watery country, to say you need to make do.

Searching Youtube for inland navigation scenes in Siberia, where they have about a milion miles of waterways, I came across this extreme case of making do. It seems there was no tugboat available to pull a pontoon with an excavator on it to a different place...

A Quote

"We only understand 10 percent of the climate issue. That is not enough to wreck the world economy with Kyoto-like measures."
--Henk Tennekes, former research director, Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute


Henk Tennekes

This is not 'gezellig', but this sound needs to be heard against that well-oiled propaganda campaign by Mr Gore, the only person to ever receive a Nobel-prize for presentation skills.