An Open Mind Is the Best Way to View the World....

HSBC, which calls itself "the world's local bank," has a series of wonderful ads in the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. They show contrasting views of the same things. All of the ads lead off with the sentence, "An open mind is the best way to view the world." (That's what their website says, anyway. According to my fractured French, the ad here says "To be open to the world is to comprehend the differences in points of view.")

This one shows a young woman looking up from her studies. Is she concentrating hard on a particularly bright idea? Or is she daydreaming as a way to avoid studying?

My favorite is the one with two apples, each with a bite out of it. one apple is labeled "FORBIDDEN," and the other apple is labeled "RECOMMENDED."

Another shows two pictures each of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and two of an ancient sculpture of a male torso. the pictures alternate with these labels: (tower) IMPERFECT, (torso) PERFECT, (tower) PERFECT, (torso) IMPERFECT. Depending on your point of view, the Tower of Pisa is either imperfect (it's LEANING, for pete's sake!) or so perfect that despite shifts in the soil, it's still standing. The torso is either a perfect work of art from times past, or a dusty old statue with chips and cracks.

What a great insight, especially for a person coming from Gallaudet, where deafness is experienced as PERFECT by some and IMPERFECT by others.

I'll try to get my own photographs of these ads so I can include them here. (Well, I did get one, but it killed my batteries, and by the time I found batteries in the airport, the ads were on the inaccessible other side of the security checkpoint.)