The Coolness of Dutch Hardware Stores

Soon enough my new pursuit of documenting the vocabulary of the street had me facing a constant brutal triage of not only my blocks of free time, but of each passing moment whenever I walked outside the room. Even the breakfast buffet at the hotel could be a richness of little written descriptions. Each meal was one-off opportunity to find something unique.

There was too much to see and to discover. Especially in the Netherlands---the continental nation that most rivaled the richness of the vocabulary one sees in the United States---I was faced with a unceasing agonizing choice of how to parcel out my time.

The only way I would cope with this situation was to develop a set of personal rules---i.e., rules of the "game" I had invented for myself. The Law of One Shot is an example, although actually that is more of an empirical observation of transcendental truth than a personal game rule.  Most of the time I violated that particular cannon, as I did so many other of my by-laws. My score of each outing with my iPhone (and it always went with me, as fully charged as I could get it) was always horribly in the negative from the mental deductions I gave myself. But I always let myself off the hook at the end of each day, and began with fresh enthusiasm each time I left the room. Overall the rules were quite successful at relieving me of much agony.

One game rule I enforced quite well for myself that I did not take any shots that did not have unique and interesting words inside them. This helped conserve my time greatly by eliminating all manner of plain landscape shots of monuments and architecture---the kind I might have normally taken as a tourist---unless there were readable words that were in some way cool for that particular setting.
Sometimes that meant walking around for many minutes trying to find some random street om sign to put into the foreground. Often the more absurd the juxtaposition, the more satisfying the photograph felt.

I also eliminated almost all selfies. I'm not a selfie taker to begin with, so it wasn't much of a sacrifice. I never purposely took a selfie at all until the end of the trip with Red, but not infrequently I would catch myself in reflection in a shop window, or a glass door, each one of which could be a richness of little printed signs.  A tiny shuttered hardware store along a canal in Gröningen, on a Sunday afternoon when no one was in sight who might object to my extended curiosity, could keep me occupied for nearly a quarter hour as I worked down list of products, noticing ever smaller interesting words. 

That was time well spent. I confess that in such instances, I rarely sacrificed a great vocabulary acquisition even if I happened to notice the outline of my reflection in the shot.