I like graffiti that sends a message. There’s one wall decoration that I still wish I’d captured, but I never got around to it. I used to go to the Peace Club, a dive bar outside Camp Casey in South Korea– back when we still had troops that far north. In the bathroom, they had a piss-trough instead of urinals. I remember it well. The wall over the trough was littered with graffiti; there was barely room for anything new. After all the time I spent there, removing consumed beer from my body, I read most of it. One “exchange” is still crystal clear.
“I used to believe in the common decency of man”
“I still do”
They were written by two people, the second below the first. After a while, I used to pick the spot at the trough that would put these two lines at eye-level. In some ways, I still miss that wall and these two comments. I doubt it’s there any more. Last I heard, the Peace Club was no more. I do hope that management kept that wall intact.
Ever since then, I’ve been extremely interested in graffiti. The first, up top, is from a small covered walkway in Old Quebec. Yeah, some people still aren’t crazy about being French-speakers in an English-speaking country.
Iceland is such a sanitary country, but they are developing a graffiti problem. This wall just struck me as the antithesis of what one expects to see in Iceland.
Tallin, Estonia had some good material as well. The tagger below, it seems, was hungry. I guess he (or she) likes Italian.
The next one, though, is my favorite from Estonia. It sends a pretty powerful political message, and indicates the importance of open dialogue in a free society.
There was clearly a taggers’ debate going on here. First, someone wrote “Fuck Fascism!” I happen to concur. Next, someone put “anti” in front. Since I’m not a fascist, “Fuck AntiFascism!” doesn’t exactly resonate. But, a third person joined the conversation and crossed out “anti,” and then a fourth person crossed out “Fuck”. So, we wind up with the message, “Fascism!” Of course, I could have the order of events a bit screwed up, but we can see clearly where the discussion ends. Such a shame.
Also political was a bit of graffiti I saw in Paris metro station. This was during the Sarkozy/Segoline election, which got pretty nasty.
Wow, I guess this guy doesn’t watch Fox News!
The last sign of Iceland‘s foray into globalization is gone. The small Arctic country is going to lose its three McDonald’s restaurants. Three locations were owned by Lyst Hr., all in the capital city, Reykjavik. According to Lyst, the economic situation was just too difficult, especially since the company had to by its supplies from Germany. The decline in the Icelandic krona relative to the euro just pushed costs too high. In order to be profitable, the Icelandic Big Mac would have to become the most expesnive in the world, at $6.36. Right now, it’s priced at $5.29, with the most expensive in Norway and Switzerland at $5.75.
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