Short Story Dispenser: a cute way to kill time at the train station
Upon my last trip to Lille, I had the chance to bump into a
brand new invention… It’s a “Short Story Dispenser!” standing in a waiting room
called “Espace Zen”
With curiosity, I pressed on the button “3 minutes” choosing the time I preferred to spend while waiting for the (delayed) train. (There were 1-, 3- and 5 minutes.) The dispenser spit out a small ribbon of paper containing a short story. The one I got was a kind of poem called “Vers Libres” that has no actual rules for the format or number of syllables, and sometimes it even has no rhyme! My feedback was…I didn’t get a thing about this poem! Lol, anyway my French boyfriend told me that the poem was kind of deep and you had to work hard to interpret it. I found out that I spent way more time on that story than I expected to, anyhow.
However, my experiment wasn’t over yet. I pressed on the “1 minute” and
“5 minutes” buttons, to find out what kind(s) of story I would be given (so
much time to kill). I got a cartoon whose joke I didn’t really get for the one-minute
story and a fable in a form of poem teaching a moral at the end of the story
for the five-minute story.
With curiosity, I pressed on the button “3 minutes” choosing the time I preferred to spend while waiting for the (delayed) train. (There were 1-, 3- and 5 minutes.) The dispenser spit out a small ribbon of paper containing a short story. The one I got was a kind of poem called “Vers Libres” that has no actual rules for the format or number of syllables, and sometimes it even has no rhyme! My feedback was…I didn’t get a thing about this poem! Lol, anyway my French boyfriend told me that the poem was kind of deep and you had to work hard to interpret it. I found out that I spent way more time on that story than I expected to, anyhow.
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| Short Story Dispenser at Lyon Part-Dieu |
I have to admit that the Short Story Dispenser is totally
genius for killing time. The machine was able to keep me from looking pointlessly
at my mobile during the whole time that I was in the waiting room.
Unfortunately the dispenser in Lyon Part-Dieu provides only stories in French. For
those who are interested in reading English short stories, you may go to this
website. I had taken a peek to find out that there were SO MANY short stories written
by well-known writers such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia
Woolf and many more. As well, some stories were created by amateur writers who
submitted their stories to the website; so can you!
And for those who want to see the actual Short Story
Dispenser, you can check their availability on the map. Aside from France, today you can find
this dispenser mainly in the U.S., with a few in Canada, one in Guinea and one
in Hong Kong. Good news for people who speak French, on the French-version website,
you will find more varieties of story than in the English version, and they
have even erotic stories to read. So what are you waiting for? Let’s start
learning French!
อ่านภาษาไทย คลิกที่นี่
Fun story with interesting knowledge. Good trick to encourage reading habit.
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