Speed humps? I beg your pardon?!

When I moved to Florida from New England, I noticed that some of the road sign terminology differed from what I was used to. In New England, the signs read Speed Bumps. In Florida, Speed Humps. Three years later, this is still funny to me. Apparently this term is used in the UK as well, and this got me thinking about what other amusing signs we might find on our home exchange adventures in Europe. So let's see how good the rest of you are: which one of these signs is a fake?

Leave your answers in the comments!

Whatvia?

Yesterday I got an email from Ståle, our Norwegian home exchanger, telling me that he and the family were going on a short vacation to Latvia. Huh? This stuck me as particularly strange, as Latvia isn't know for its tourism, at least not to Americans. I told him so, and it he promised to give me the full report when they return. In the meantime, I decided to check Latvia out and apparently I am not the only one who thinks vacationing in Latvia is strange, as there is a website called YouWon'tBelieveIt that extols its virtues. Maybe the website should be called You Wouldn't Have Believed It - it just seems a bit more positive. Apparently some of the cows in Latvia are blue (the color not the emotion) from drinking water from the Baltic sea, and all you have to do to become a werewolf is to get naked at exactly midnight and then run backwards through a tree root that's been formed into a loop. It sounds pretty good to me, and I definitely wouldn't have believed it.

image: TAVA

Home exchange: Germany Schmermany

I've been fortunate enough to find 2 families who want to exchange their homes with us, and when the German exchange fell apart I started to wonder. Was I crazy to look for a 3rd exchange? Would it be possible for us as first time exchangers to coordinate a 6 month exchange in 3 different countries, working backwards, with only a few months lead time? Luckily for my family, I am particularly drawn toward problems that seem almost impossible to solve. I went back to my old files on a family in Norway, our other target country. We had discussed an exchange, but they seemed to lose interest over time and they had received another offer, so I thought that it was all over. My daughter Sara had really wanted to stay in Scandinavia, and she kept telling me that she could understand Norwegian because of its similarity to Swedish. I speak Swedish, Mom, so I'll have an advantage in Norge. She pronounced it the Swedish way, Nor-ee-yuh. The problem was that I had already told this family that we were most likely going to exchange with the German family, so by now the Norwegians must have made other plans. Oops. Hey, they had been straightforward in letting me know that they had another offer, and I did the same for them. I didn't want to string them along unnecessarily, and I thought I was being considerate. Apparently I was the only one who thought so, and the Norwegian family was not too happy to hear from me again.