In Pictures: Signs of Asia (Part 1)

Outside a coffee house in Jaipur, India.  One could enter here to urinate, but anything beyond this had to be done elsewhere.

This sign at a park near Luang Prabang, Laos was curiously posted on the main trail leading to a waterfall.  The reason people came to the park was to see the waterfall, yet the trail to access it was, in theory at least, off limits.  Hundreds of visitors walk past the sign every day.

Ah, Chinese signs.  Rare is the nation that could, if it weren't so embarrasing, promote itself to foreign tourists as "the country with the most mistranslated signs in the world."  Some, however, aren't so much mistranslated as much as they are overly literal translations.  This particular sign is in the Guilin train station.

This sign in the Burmese border town of Tachilek reads, "SERIOUS ACTION WILL BE TAKEN AGAINST DRUG OFFENDERS."

And this sign posted at my guest house in Chiang Mail, Thailand says what many other guest house signs in Thailand say: "For everyone's security no strangers and prostitutes allowed in the house."

Not reading Turkish, I cannot tell you for sure what this sign, posted on a cliff edge several hundred feet above the Tigris River outside the town of Hasankeyf, is conveying.  But I have a good guess.

TO SEE "PART 2" OF THIS SERIES, CLICK HERE