Yeah, I was living in Auckland NZ when this happened. (Actually, as I recall it happened at least twice to different passengers.) After awhile he started wondering why it was such a long flight from Los Angeles and why they were traveling over so much water. 
I would have thought the first tip-off would have been the price of the ticket.
It’s a good job that we don’t have an airport in this Newark , otherwise we could be having people end up here instead of the USA. Mind you, I have heard that our town is a more pleasant place than the one in New Jersey. 
No, he actaully had a ticket to Oakland, California. He mis-heard the boarding announcement. How he was allowed on board with the wrong boarding pass I don’t know.
Actually, this wasn’t a case of poor geographical knowledge but just an error in getting on the wrong plane. However, it did take him quite awhile after they were in the air to figure it out - like somewhere around Fiji.
This is the plot to an episode of Full House.
I have met a fair few Brits in Ireland wondering why they couldn’t spend sterling there. :rolleyes:
My grandmother was a Dominican from Dominica, and she used to get very irritated with that mistake, even though it’s quite an easy one to make.
In her memory, thanks everyone for pointing out the distinction.
Interesting-but-irrelevant Dominica fact: where the cruise liners dock in Roseau, the capital, the Dominican government erected a stone that says “The British were here, thank God”. The French government, which had also once held the island, then donated money to build the pier, on the proviso that they too could erect a memorial stone. Which says “The French were here also, thank God.”
I think that was in an episode of Full House or something. Seriously.
On preview.
I am confirmed. Wow, the things I can remember.
We had some British friends fly to Utah for a visit. After picking them up from the airport, they wanted to take a quick drive through Salt Lake City. As we were driving, the husband practically had his head hanging out the window as if searching for something. Finally, he asked “So where are all the polygamist”?
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
I don’t have a way of communicating with them here but I am really curious to know whatever happened to them. Those two are bound to get in trouble at some point forward. I hope that their vacation ends on a better note and they don’t blame the country if it doesn’t go well. I hear tourists complaining all the time because ‘it’s too hot’ or ‘people don’t speak English’, or some such nonsense.
Speaking of dumb tourists: last year when some Caribbean islands were devastated by one of the hurricanes tourists were evacuated and placed in hotels in the Dominican Republic to finish their holidays. Guess what? Some were complaining that they had paid to stay in such and such island and they had been sent to the D.R. Makes me wish we could have found a pilot stupid enough to fly them back in the middle of the hurricane. Some people have no idea what a hurricane is or what it does. It’s scary to think that these people breed.
It’s not? Damn.
Actually I will be in Santiago in 2 weeks to visit my sister. So I will wave in your direction from the mountains. We will also be going to the beaches, but we are aware that we need to take a bus.
Well, but I bet it made a cool photo, though. :rolleyes: Og, people are so tragically stupid.
I, for one, would be very happy to have bought a ticket to Oakland and end up in Auckland. Who the hell wants to go to Oakland, anyway?
No way! You’d think they’d know that—it’s not like going from Britain to Canada. You would understand a Brit not knowing that the dollars are different, but you wouldn’t expect an American to be that dense.
OK, you probably would. Bad example. 
Not to be down on Utah, but I would be impressed they know the American regional stereotypes so well. I, for one, would not be able to tell you the most (for example) Catholic county in England.
You think that’s bad? Every once in a while I hear those complaints here in Southern California from American visitors.
It’s not just international travelers. I used to moonlight at a call center for the Biltmore Estate. Over the phone, we’d sell tickets to the Estate($40 a pop!) and reservations for the Inn on Biltmore Estate (very swanky, will typically run you $300 a night). It wasn’t uncommon for someone to put a couple hundred bucks on their credit card, and **then ** ask, “So what state is the Biltmore Estate in?”
A bus all the way to Spain?
My friend has lived in California for her entire life. Her father worked for TWA until he retired (it was still TWA when he retired). Thus, she flew frequently at little cost to her. She often visited friends in Florida, Arizona, and Nevada, and a sister and niece in Minnesota. I thought she knew her US geography.
We were planning a trip to the panhandle area of Texas. She commented about how she had always wanted to go to Taos, NM. I suggested that since we were taking The 40 we could add a day or two to go to Taos. She looked at me as though I had two heads and asked, “Do you have to go through New Mexico to get to Texas?” I told her no, that we could go through Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma, and possibly Kansas instead.
Another trip, another time, the brother of a friend asked our host to take him to Woodstock. “Ya’know, the location of the music festival from the '60s?” The only problem was that we were in Georgia. The host politely explained the mistake.
My sister used to work in a donut shop near the border crossing into Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. She actually did see someone pull up during a blazing-hot July day with skis strapped to the top of their car, because they were going to Canada, and that’s where the snow is, right?
I spent some time during the eighties working just outside Detroit. This was during the Calgary winter olympics. One Friday, one of my co-workers asked me whether I was going to drive to Calgary for the weekend to take in the sports. I explained to him that Calgary was north of Montana. He still didn’t get it. I had to explain to him that Calgary was at least four days’ drive away, assuming eight hours a day of driving*.
This sort of thing might be forgiveable in people like my English relatives, who wanted to visit Niagara Falls and the Rockies on the same day trip, but for someone living here in North America?
[sub]*Some friends and I later proved this by driving it. Even then we drove round the clock, taking shifts, to get from Flint, Michigan, to Minott, North Dakota in less than two days. And the next day, we made Leduc, Alberta, at 11PM.[/sub]
I was browsing through an atlas one day when a woman I knew asked how much it cost to take the bus from Houston, Texas to London, England. Even though she was well into her 30s, she honestly had no idea England is across the Atlantic.
In her defense, she was mildly retarded.
Robin
My husband’s take on this:
I am guessing that the ‘Jesus font’ is a Danish saying.*
Well, if she was mentally retarded, that’s not really that bad. Poor thing.
OK, I guess I don’t get it. Just because you’ve never been someplace doesn’t mean you don’t know how freakin huge it is. For example, I’ve never been to Brazil, and I know it’s pretty good sized. Similarly, had I been to Rio once or twice, I would also know that Brazil is freakin big.
My point: Been there or not, you know a realitive scale of something. For example, the first time I went to Houston Texas, per say, I knew damn well it was going to be bigger than, say, Omaha Nebraska. I find these stories really hard to believe, especially about people coming to the US and Canada. I mean, isn’t that the MAIN THING about the US and Canada is that they are big? How could you possibly miss that point, especially if you are in the subset of people buying an international air ticket? That is like starting a fight with Mike Tyson, and then saying, oh! I didn’t realize you were tough.