Reminds me of a joke in which a guy goes to a very posh party in New York City. The hostess asks him where he’s from and he says “Idaho”, whereupon she smiles very condescendingly and says “Around here, dear, we pronounce it ‘Ohio’.”
Visited Vienna this last year and picked up a postcard featuring a cartoon 'roo in lederhosen with the caption “No kangaroos in Austria!” I saw t-shirts and stickers with the same thing or close variants–it appeared to be a fairly common Austrian tourist meme. A GIS will back this up.
For a while, my dad taught English part time at a community college in a small town in Michigan called Yale. He enjoyed telling people “I teach at Yale”.
I’m sure because of her own story about how surprised she was that it was not “summer” there.
I remember reading an anecdote (anyone remember this story or have a cite?) of a person who was trying to get a travel agent to book them a hotel in LA and rattled off a few prospective hotels to the travel agent, who had never heard of them. It turns out that the wannabe traveler had gotten a list of hotels in New Orleans, and figured that “New Orleans, LA” meant that New Orleans was a suburb of Los Angeles.
It wasn’t “summer” there, it was summer. Jeeze.
I hear East Coast people talk about these states called “Nevahdah” and “Oreegone” but I can’t find them on a map for the life of me.
I want to go to Vienna and ask every pretty girl if they want to help me get to fucking. Either way, it will be a hell of a trip.
Many, many years ago, before 9/11, I worked for a mostly domestic airline. We were expected to memorize all of the airport/city codes that the company serviced in a short time. Without admitting anything personally, I will note that there were common mistakes in bookings:
SLC = Salt Lake City, UT; STL - Saint Lous, MO
HNL = Honolulu, HI; HLN = Helena, MT
MCO = Orlando, FL; MSY = New Orleans, LA
When voice recognition was new, and the company had grown into international routes, it brought a whole NEW set of issues. When a computer asks where you want to fly to and your first response is, “um,” it would relay to my computer screen that you wanted to go to Ulm, Germany. In the beginning a LOT of people wanted to fly to “Germany.”
I vaguely recall some “fun” mistakes made by customers. Frankfort, KY vs. Frankfurt, Germany. Manchester, NH vs. Manchester, England. I don’t recall anyone actually getting as far as the wrong destination, although I’m sure it happened. Some customers think they’re “smart” by quoting the airport name or code & get it all wrong. “OCA” is not “Orange County Airport” in SoCal. You want “SNA.” If you tell me you want to fly from “Metro,” you’d better be prepared to tell me what city. It actually came down to my asking a woman where she was calling from & her answer was, “my kitchen.” :rolleyes:
My own parents did it on a smaller scale. From Victoria Station in London they needed to take the Tube to Gloucester Road, London. But they told the attendant that they wanted to go to Gloucester. Big difference. Fortunately, they noticed after a short ride & got routed the right way.
When I asked my Tom Tom to give me directions to London, Ontario, as I was just thinking to myself why the hell it seemed to be taking much longer than it should, I was shocked to see just how far my car could drive under the Atlantic before the cold ocean began pouring in.
Would that be Frankfurt am Main, or Frankfurt an der Oder? Many a tourist has found the train journey to Frankfurt to be unexpectedly long.
My relatives in Greenville, North Carolina would just be happy not to have their mail constantly redirected to the larger Greenville, *South *Carolina. At least we can all just specify PGV on airline tickets.
I haven’t run into this one, but in all fairness, I have had very good Idaho-made cheese in my four years here. Most of the other cheese I eat is from Oregon. Yum, Tillamook!
Iowa is known for cheese? I thought it was known for corn. At least that’s all I saw driving across it on my move out here. 300 miles or so of it.
Here’s a “kitteh” who’s a bit confused about it:
I was on a family trip on a Greyhound bus in New England, when two Korean tourists approached the driver and politely asked if he could turn the bus around. You see, they had wanted to go to Baltimore, but due to their thick accents, they pronounced the city as “Bossimore.” So the NYC ticket agent had issued them a ticket to Boston.
“We muss go back to Bossimore!” became a catchphrase for the rest of the trip.
Those t-shirts get mentioned in the media every time a kangaroo or wallaby escapes from captivity in Austria as happened a few months ago and in 2013.
There are a surprising number of colonies of Australian marsupials living wild in Europe, some of them not too far from Austria.
Anecdotally, I heard that some tourist ended up in Rhode Island when they meant to go the the Isle of Rhodes.
The first and only time I bought something from Amazon, my package got lost in the mail. A few months later - after they’d sent a replacement package - the original showed up, having taken a detour to Austria.
That’s not necessarily the result of people not knowing the difference between Austria and Australia - it could equally be the fact that the bin for “Australia” is right next to the bin for “Australia” at the sorting office, and it just got tossed in the wrong bin. I once received a much-delayed letter from a friend in Kansas addressed to me in Dublin. When it arrived it was stamped across the front “missent to Jakarta”. I struggle to believe that anyone confuses Ireland and Indonesia.
I seem to remember a t.v plot where Tasmania and Tanzania got interchanged, just can’t quite recall what show it was…
actually, upon further googling, it may have been this incident here: Tasmania? Tanzania? Trip Wasn't Cricket
" A Pakistani cricketer finally made it to Tasmania today after a mix-up in travel plans sent him to Tanzania."
I guess chances are it’s happened more than once though…
When I was a truck driver it was not that uncommon for drivers (not me of course) to go to the wrong Newcastle (There are two large towns called Newcastle 200 miles apart) or the wrong Newport (any number of them…)
One day I was working for a large supermarket distribution company. This company often used to keep us hanging around for hours with nothing to do and after having been sat in the canteen for six hours, a driver, who was employed by the same agency as me, was told to take a load to “Blackpole”. Blackpole was a store about two miles away.
Two hours later, the store phoned to ask where their goods were. It was subsequently established that the driver was 100 miles away en route to Blackpool. To compound the mistake, this meant that he had used up all his allowed hours and had to park up for the night. I never saw him again…