Naughty Bilingual Sign In Tallinn Airport, Estonia

by Sean McLachlan on


I think I’m going to like Estonia …

This country of 1.3 million people only has a little more than 900,000 people who speak Estonian as their native language yet they’re confident enough with their national tongue to make a bilingual joke right as you enter the airport in the capital city of Tallinn.

Language was politics in the old Soviet republics, and for the long decades during which Estonia was part of the Soviet Union the people had to learn Russian. Many also learned Finnish through TV stations broadcast from Helsinki that were never jammed (more on that story later in the series) while English was something few people ever learned. Now all the younger generation is learning English and it’s easy to get by without knowing any Estonian.

A lack of Estonian, of course, doesn’t lessen the impact of this sign!

Check out this new series: “Exploring Estonia: The Northern Baltics In Wintertime.”

Coming up next: Tallinn’s Medieval Old Town!

[Photo by Sean McLachlan]

No skeletons on the New Delhi metro, please

by Sean McLachlan on


A friend of mine, freelance photographer Jane Shepherdson, was recently in New Delhi and rode on the city’s metro (subway system). She captured this odd sign about what’s prohibited for passengers to carry.

Some of it is predictable, such as explosives, guns, and radioactive materials. You also can’t carry “manure of any kind” (including your own, one would suppose) or rags. That includes oily rags in case you’re wondering.

What really caught her eye was the prohibition against passengers carrying “Human skeleton, ashes, and part of Human body”.

Makes sense to me. When I’m on public transport I only want to share it with the living. What’s scary, though, is that they wouldn’t have put this sign up unless someone had actually carried body parts on the metro. So if you’re going to New Delhi, please, leave the body parts in your hotel room.