The following tourist postcard greeting contains a hidden name of a world city and its country. After you remove all spaces and punctuation, delete exactly half the letters. What's left are, in correct order, the city and country names. Identify the city and country.

Hotel suite swank--I find lobby grand!

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From Page-a-Day Calendar 2016: Amazing Mind Benders, by Puzzability (Mike Shenk, Amy Goldstein and Robert Leighton), Workman Publishing, NY; puzzle for November 8.

For a child, living in Kassou in the West African country of Burkina Faso, the neighbor town Sili might be a 'world city'. And maybe this child can read signs in a certain regular way of his own, which we find difficult to regard as 'correct' in our sense. So if we are generous with the term 'correct', and if we are even more generous with the term 'world city', there might be a little solution beside the big solution (a 'cook', as chess problemists would say). After the step of deleting half the letters, we have this:

s u i s a n k i f i l o b r a

Maybe that child will find a way now to read this in a kind of order (an ability I do not have) which is not linear from left to right or in reverse, arriving at the result:

siliburkinafaso

Edited on December 1, 2016, 6:44 am

Posted by ollie on 2016-11-30 12:43:56