Let me tell you about the most ignorant person I’ve ever met in my life. A rotund middle-aged lady who claimed she was from Newfoundland, though she didn’t seem to know the first thing about the place. That said, she didn’t seem to know the first thing about anything, so maybe not a surprise.
She sat next to me and my ex on a flight from Auckland, NZ to the Cook Islands, which are in the South Pacific. She’d overheard that we were flying on to LA, and was outraged. “They’re making me go back to New Zealand to go to China!” she spluttered.
In what I hoped were patient tones, I explained that we were currently heading to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and China was thousands of kilometres back west the other way; Auckland was the nearest major airport on the way back. “You don’t understand,” she whined, “I came all the way down to New Zealand from Canada, and now I’ve got to go back down to get back up again! It’s ridiculous!” She rolled her eyes at the injustice of it all: “But, oh no, you get to go on to LA.”
Eventually it transpired that she could only think in terms of latitude, and was entirely unaware of the huge distances involved in longitude, and in particular the vast width of the Pacific Ocean. I eventually got her to shut up by saying “China’s still quite a poor country and the people there can’t afford to go on South Pacific island holidays, so there aren’t any direct flights.”
We bumped into her a couple of days later and she was bitching that the place was so primitive, because her Canadian wireless internet connection wouldn’t work. I’ll say that again: her wireless connection. As in the one that hooked her laptop up to her home wifi.
The Cook Islands are lovely, laid-back Polynesian islands, and as such they work on ‘island time’: be patient, keep smiling and cool, things will happen eventually. Bumped into her again in a gorgeous little restaurant on the beach. She was screaming at the waiter: “HEY YOU! HEY YOU!” and beckoning at him with a bent finger. He came over eventually. “Where can I find a beach where I can rent a chair?!” We started trying to avoid her after that.
The last time we failed to avoid her she said she was suffering from culture shock. Now, though Polynesian, the Cooks are pretty heavily New Zealand influenced - good infrastructure, western products, etc. Exotic but homey, kind of like what I imagine the smaller Hawaiian islands must be like.
“I’m so freaked out here,” she said. “I can’t wait to get to China where it’ll be normal.”
“Oh wow no, you’re really going to get culture shock in China,” we replied.
“Nonsense! It’ll be just like being back at home,” she resolved. Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when she got there…
