One Word

Welcome back to another episode of A'lil Hoohaa's monthly photo blogging challenge. 

This month’s theme was "One Word".

We were traveling through Paris, England, and Scotland. If you're interested you can find an overview of these travel posts here. My word could simply be Journey - but that would be too easy, right?

As a blogger, it’s hard to limit myself to just one word. So let’s see what I can do.

The word Metro comes from Metropolitan, which literally means “mother city” in Greek; the city that everything else grows around.

And in France, what city if not Paris plays that role?

Want to go anywhere in the country by train? Forget direct connections; you have to detour through the capital, often switching stations across the city. With bags in tow, that means either wrestling stairs in a Metro station with no escalators or paying a grumpy taxi driver more than you expected.

One Metro station in particular caught our attention: Concorde.
Literally, it means harmony — though history tells another story. The Place de la Concorde was once a site of execution during the French Revolution, where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (among others) were guillotined.

The entire wall of the Concorde Metro station is tiled with letters, and if you look closely, it’s like one of those word search puzzles.
I spotted:

• sentant = representative
• librement = freely
• couvrement = coverage
• citoyen = citizen
• pareux = lazy

… and I left a few other words for you to decipher!

OK, not a real word but an abbreviation: NEMS, short for New Electronic Music Stores. It was a British record store run by Brian Epstein, later the company that managed the Beatles. Epstein discovered the band in his Liverpool store and turned NEMS Enterprises into their official management company. The replica of this studio can be visited in Liverpool, where we enjoyed reliving the chronological stages of the Beatles’ musical career.

What would the UK be without its iconic red phone booths? Of course, they’re no longer in use today. Instead, many have been repurposed as ATMs or Wi-Fi hotspots.
Money and electronic communication have replaced words, so to speak.

Words guide us, name our places, tell our stories, and sometimes, they disappear or change meaning altogether.

From the “mother city” of Paris to Liverpool’s NEMS and the silent phone booths of the UK, October turned out to be full of words in every sense. Some carved in tiles, some sung to the world, and some replaced by screens and numbers.

Maybe that’s what this challenge reminded me of: words are everywhere, even when we stop noticing them. You just have to look closely.

As always, don’t forget to check out the posts from my fellow bloggers participating in this month’s challenge!