A "gondola" is apparently what you call a suspended glass box that carries people from one place to another. I've never seen this type of thing outside of Taipei, although i'm sure it must exist, so perhaps thats an accurate translation. Still, I just think of boats when i here the word gondola. Here's a pic of what i'm talking about: ![[Taiwan-1.jpg]] Cool right? These things are fairly fun to ride in the winter. They have no AC so if it's hot out it will also be hot in your floating glass box. It's often windy which causes the box to sway a bit, giving the impression of instability, which adds excitement to the otherwise-sedate pace of the gondola. --- Now, to get to the point. There is some horrific design or planning going on with these gondolas. The main attraction, and the reason people ride these things, is to look out the windows. Thus i'm aesthetically appalled every time I visit and see the stickers covering the windows. You can see a bit of this in pciture above, but here is another. ![[IMG_67562.jpeg]] You see that illustration of ... something, plastered onto the windw? That is what i'm talking about. It _covers_ part of the window. What is most egregious is that there's no damn reason it should cover the window, given that there's plenty of non-window real estate slightly lower down the body of the gondola. At a guess, they utilize the window because its easy to create large adhesive stickers that can be mounted there. Easier than the non-uniform structure of the lower gondola. But this is really bad. I saw this having take the gondola several times and had my view obstructed. ![[IMG_67542.jpeg]] Look at the view from the inside. How much of that window is obscured by the back of the sticker? Let's just call it A LOT. ![[CleanShot 2025-01-04 at [email protected]]] Whats more, it obscures the bottom of the window which is exactly where you often want to look. In the gondola its most interesting to look down at what is below. --- What is going on? Pretty obviously this is some form of ad, but even so how is it so bad? The only people who are ever close enough to the gondola to see the ad are going to ride the gondola, and the ad makes the experience worse _without_ forcing people to look at it. I'm disgusted that there are ads at all on this thing, but that's not unexpected. What is unexpected is that the operator (the city government?) would not limit advertisers to NOT THE WINDOW. That is all.