Saturday, February 11, 2012

Hey, Dali!

sorry, no post last night, i was suddenly exhausted and fell asleep on the couch.. (actually quite a while ago since that happened. at some point it happened almost daily!).
just a quick post to make up.. here we were just driving around, not too far from our apartment (but have no clue anymore where this was). i suddenly saw this (i think) stencil-painted face of (must be) salvador dali on this piece of street furniture. hahaha, almost every day i learn something new, because of this blog (as a result, it also always takes me much longer to write a post than i intended. as it is usually the last thing i do before going to bed.... i usually end up going to sleep later than i should) i was looking up how you call this thing. well, its a fire alarm call box, but normally they are painted red, so im wondering whether this one is still in use (and so i learned that in the UK they call everything placed on streets, like benches, fire alarms etc "street furniture"). 
anyways... these boxes look very ancient, and they are! but they still work, and for example after 9/11 they proved useful in new york (there are 15,000 of those in new york). power and cell phone service were down in large parts of the city, but those boxes are powered from a separate supply and continue to work in the face of outages of both electrical and telephone systems...
behind is a fire hydrant. you cannot park in front of a fire hydrant. always frustrating, when you think you have found a parking spot (parking in boston is horrible!!), the fire hydrant pops up... grrrr. if you do park there, you can expect a parking ticket. or.... if there is a fire... firemen will not hesitate to damage your car... (picture here).
and once again... i wrote much more than intended! i just wanted to show this pic, and write that this is a typical residential street with use houses. that i like these streets, and that they are just as you see them in the movies... :)