JerseyMap
November By all appearances, Jersey is just another British town on an island, but it’s actually a separate country.  People take walks on the beach at low tide.  A bench with a trash can.  A retro police call box panel. Mounted into the wall of the police department for purely decorative purposes.  The phone booths resemble the old booths in Latvia.  There’s a curious story with the postal service here, just like in Transnistria or the Order of Malta. Local stores sell stamps which are good for mailing something within the island itself or to Britain. But they won’t work for sending mail to other countries: you need British stamps for that, and they’re sold only at the post office, which is closed on weekends.  A license plate.  An insurance certificate on a windshield.  The city.  A traffic light.  A street name sign.  A bit of contemporary art. If you replace the body with another leg, you’ll get the emblem of the Isle of Man.  A monument to a toad. Croak croak.  A city square with a stele commemorating World War I heroes.  A classic pedestrian crossing with zigzag road markings (to make drivers stop lane-hopping) and Belisha beacons (the yellow globes on striped poles).  The sign demonstrates what a Jersey wheel clamp looks like. Any improperly parked car will get one of these on its wheel.  It’s fashionable to install imperfect-looking glass panes with ripples and solidified globs here. To symbolize antiquity.  A working-class neighborhood.  A complex stairway.  A sign indicating that parking is permitted only for residents of the given neighborhood.  A little street.  A golden statue.  Almost all the shops have a recessed entrance.  Dumpsters.  A trash can with an ashtray.  An austere British trash can.  A wonderful local graphic motif with sardines.  The black spot indicates a dangerous stretch of the road (like in Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ireland).  Despite the fact that you can see France from here when the weather is clear, even the public bathrooms at the airport don’t have mixer taps—there are two separate taps instead. This god-awful British tradition, which presumes that a person will fill the sink with a mixture of hot and cold water and use that for washing, is ineradicable.  And only here did I realize where the State of New Jersey in the US got its name from. |
