The man visible in this picture apparently has the habit of playing music in his apartment at such a volume that it can be heard on the entire square in front of Besançon railway station, and also on the platforms of said railway station. He was playing music every time I passed by, so I assume it's some kind of regular feature. The music he is playing may require some getting used to, but contrary to other music that you often hear from stereos from other apartments or cars (rule of thumb: the louder it is played, the worse said person's taste in music), it was actually not all that bad. He mostly seems to play old rock'n'roll tracks and French chansons from the 1950s.

The interesting thing was that he was constantly moving back and forth betweeen his record player and the window -- putting on a record, then looking out the window, then, when the song had barely finished, or even while it was still playing, back to the record player and a new song. He was like a hectic DJ trying to pay as many songs to an imaginary audience as possible. Not that he had a large audience. Nobody who happened to pass by actually stopped to listen, and I only listened to his playlist because I was sitting on the railway station's platform, waiting for my train. When my train arrived, he had been going on for at least 30 minutes, and it did not appear as if he had any intention to stop anytime soon.

If you are ever in the French town of Arles and follow the ubiquitous signposts that direct you to the hotel "La Muette", you will, in the following two hours, get to know pretty much the entire town, without ever arriving at said hotel. You will also experience a few disorienting moments, such as being confronted with a signpost that points into the direction from which you just came, which will happen repeatedly during your walk.

Fortunately I didn't have to find the hotel myself, I merely followed the signs out of curiosity because, as I said, they were everywhere, and I wanted to know what a hotel looks like that has invested so much money into signposts. However, I never found the hotel, and I started wondering if it even exists. The deeper I ventured into the mediaeval city center, the more it seemed that the signposts were some form of Rosicrucian conspiracy, or maybe "La muette" is simply a code for a city tour, or maybe the person who mounted the signs was just totally incompetent.

Google claims that the hotel exists. After having extensively perused the signposts, I cannot vouch for the validity of this information.

As a follow-up to my recent blog entry on the reorganisation of two important Vienna tramway lines, here is a link to an article in the German Strassenbahn & Nahverkehr-Magazin on the sad state of the Vienna tramway network, which is about the only network in Europe that is not being extended, while millions of euros are wasted on subway extensions with more than questionable value.

At pretty short notice, I sat in with DJ Barbara at Rhiz yesterday for a light, breezy set of summer music. The few people who were there said they liked it. If you want to hear the five hours of music that we played, check out these streaming links (online until August 10th):

• 9:00pm - 10:30pm
• 10:30pm - midnight
• midnight - 1:30am
• 1:30am - 2:20am

Tracks were selected in strictly alternating order by Barbara and myself. Barbara started, then it's my track, and so on.

Due to a glitch in the sound system, the streamed sound is mono only. For the first three hours or so, you'll hear the left stereo channel only, then during Cat Stevens' "Here Comes My Baby", I noticed the glockenspiel was missing and switched the amp to mono, so at least you get both channels.

If you have any questions about any of the tracks I picked, feel free to ask.

Some cities employ animals to lead tourists around and show them the sights. One of the towns that I visited recently (predictably) used an owl, another town (unexpectedly, but in retrospect quite logically) used a porcupine. Both were rather cute.

It's something of a strange experience if you're in a relatively small town somewhere in France, reading a comic book that you bought in a different city a few days before, and you suddenly realize that the comic takes place in the very same city where you are at the moment.