I love this sign. Heehee! "Stop here and wait for the bell!" It's at a (smaller) post office in Curacao. It also illustrates how the island is a multicultural, multilingual environment. Papiamento, Dutch, English, and Spanish are the main ones.
One of my interviewees explained that there are novelty tambu songs in English and Dutch. Tambu is also present in Venezuela, among other places. It has a different name and there are some other differences I won't get into. My point is that there is tambu in Spanish, too.
I haven't researched this, but right now it looks to me like the Dutch have bought lots of property and converted it into bed-and-breakfasts, and other tourism-related businesses. Then they bring in Dutch employees and interns, so much of the money generated by those tourism businesses doesn't circulate in the local economy.
Mind you, I look like a local. I went to a beach the other day and the parking lady spoke Dutch to me and didn't speak the local language. A Dutch family saw me and thought I was the taxidriver they had called.
I can see how some speak of neo-colonialism. I confess, though, that I haven't sought out "the other side" to get a different perspective.
And what I'm saying may be unrelated to the sticker, but it's just interesting to note.
The traffic sign means something along the lines of, "Watch for pedestrians."
No, that's not me filming a government official downtown---but it could have been! We saw the interview on TeleCuracao, one of the two local television stations, that evening. The man in the dark suit is the TV journalist.
The bright yellow buildings you see in the background are government buildings.
