No-one knows how to spell 蒙特利尔 anymore

I spotted a strange looking sign on Thursday inside Le Drugstore, a bar in the gay village, and asked a friend with a camera to take a photo so I could send it into Hanzi Smatter, a site which makes fun of bad Chinese & Japanese writing as used by white people (kinda like engrish.com, but the other way around). The photo, along with a description cut and pasted from a few emails I sent to the site’s owner, is up there now. After some discussion, it was decided that the sign is supposed to read 蒙特利尔, or “Montréal” — except that it’s been written from bottom to top instead of top to bottom, and the character at the bottom of the sign has been rotated counterclockwise by 90°. (Plus, of course, it’s hard to read with the one character burnt out like that.)

You’d think people would ask someone who could read the bloody language before bolting that sign to the wall. I just hope they didn’t proceed to tattoo that on themselves as well…