Belfast has a lot of signs. The most common one I see is the „alcohol free area“ sign. It’s everywhere. I suppose this is a real issue here in Belfast. There are also a ton of signs which appeal to the pedestrians to keep the streets clean. No litter, no dog poop. One sign told me that the layout of a specific street recently changed. Another one displayed „Highway to Health“. That’s all definitely interesting. But can somebody tell my why they did not think about setting up street signs? Is that too much to ask for?
First of all, here is a highlight reel of the signs I saw thus far:
Now, let’s talk about why there are no street signs. That might be an overstatement. Some street names are made visible. They are attached to the houses at a corner of a street. But let me emphasize: some. I don’t think these half-done signs deserve to be called street signs. They are not even standardised! You might think my inner German everything-needs-to-be-perfectly-organized demon is coming through. But no, that’s not it. I simply need these street signs. As I’ve expressed in prior articles, I have zero ounce of orientation & I am walking around the city every day. A direction sign would be delightful.
I talked to one of my colleagues at work about it. He told me that people are expected to know the streets in the city. Ok then. Let me reflect on how much I know about the street layout in Berlin. That’s right. I know nothing about it. But surely I will learn all about Belfast’s streets in two months. Enough with the rant, I think the city is at least making an effort: signs pointing to tourist attractions. The future of describing the way: „the fifth street on the left after seeing St. George’s Market on the right“. Now go straight ahead to read about my work.
There is not much to tell about work this week. I still have the assignment to research the migration of a server to a cloud. I am studying the guides given by Amazon and set up some virtual machines to experiment with them. I also worked on the maintenance tasks today. They include simple things like archiving old files from the server and burning them to a DVD. But I enjoy the calm week up until now. I believe the next week will be way more stressful, since the office move will happen on Friday the 3rd of June.
