I’ve admittedly only just skimmed this thread, but I think the point is that the distance from the island of Dominica to Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic is approximately 1,000 miles.
To see what you are missing is to realize that it was jacquilynne ** that mentioned how people confuse Dominica (smaller island) with the Dominican Republic (that is part of the bigger Hispaniola island) The OP did not mention this. Between Dominica** to Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic, there are about 1000 miles of Caribbean sea.
I think some of it, for Europeans, can be that they consider their own home nations to be the normal, or default, size for a nation. Thus - true story, here - a French exchange student, who knows he could drive across his country in a day hasn’t internalized that it’s just not possible to do a weekend automobile trip from Massachusetts to Disneyland, and get back in time for school classes on Monday, without breaking some road speed laws. At the very least.
Then there’s the apochryphal story of the two Scots brothers: one living in Glasgow, the other in Vancouver: the one in the UK calls the one in Canada to tell him, “Mum’s on the 10:50 flight from Heathrow, coming into Toronto. I think it would be a good idea if you were there to meet her.” I leave it to your imagination to provide the conversation that follows after the other brother responds: “You meet her: you’re closer!”
Less astonishing to me, but still part and parcel of the same thing, I’d met someone who lived in a western state (IIRC Washington) who was a guest at a convention in Massachusetts. And he was honestly shocked to see the road signs on the Mass Pike, listing NYC as being less than 200 miles away. He hadn’t internalized the difference in state sizes between the east and west. (He was also far less annoying about it, than many of the stories mentioned here - it was a comment of the “Wow, that just seems wrong to be able to go from one end of a state to the other end in less than a couple of days,” sort.
I know I’ve been surprised in the past by things that I’d had considered to be part and parcel of the definition of a large American city: A subway system that runs 24/7; a defined city center vice a simple geographical center to the city; multiple, jealously competing police forces. Thus, I’ve been shocked by D.C., Norfolk, and other “real” cities that all lacked things that I’d thought were part of the definitions of a big, American city.
I was once parked at a scenic overlook on the Pacific Coast Highway in Northern California. A couple pulled over to ask for directions, wanting to know if they were travelling north or south. At the time, the Pacific Ocean was to their right.
Well, and size of the US vs. Europe can cause interesting issues in the reverse. Like the time my sister was in Ireland, discussing with a local the prospect of driving from Galway to Dublin (I think it’s like 3 hours or so?). The local thought it would be outrageous to drive that in a day since it was so far. That’s nothing to those of us raised on The Great Plains, where 3 hours is a quick day trip to Kansas City to go shopping.
When I lived in Texas and mentioned I am originally from Nebraska I got asked alot “What time is it there?” Then there was the time that some guy insisted that Nebraska was on the border with Canada, even after I reminded him I lived there 18 years before I left… Or the time I brought a friend home to Omaha and he wanted to do a day trip to Mount Rushmore (in his defense, Texas really is so huge that everything to the north and east of it appear to be teeny-tiny little states. Still, Omaha to Mount Rushmore is more like 8 hours of driving.)
Asheville, NC is located in a tri-state area, very close to TN and SC. The customer probably picked up a Biltmore Estate brochure from some nearby tourist destination (e.g. Gatlinburg, TN, which is about an hour or two away) and simply wanted to know which direction they needed to head.
On a couple of occasions I have done that. “Here I am, a foreigner with some Sterling but no Euros. On ever other occasion I’ve been in Dublin someone has been delighted to stiff me on the exchange rate by taking my pounds. Why not now?” But that’s just because I can’t be arsed to prepare, and just results in me making a trip to a cash point. Not knowing that Eire (like every other country in Europe) has its own currency is just startlingly dumb.
But scale is one of the key problems. If you are used to seeing maps that cover part of say, Belgium, where a few centimetres equals a short drive, and are then presented with a map of Colorado where a few centimetres equals most of a day’s driving, you need to consciously apply brainpower to prevent an embarrassing mistake. People know the distance on an intellectual level but not at an automatic level.
She wasn’t so retarded that she couldn’t grasp the concept of “really big ocean”. She was from the Virgin Islands, so she knew you can’t drive a bus across the ocean. I just assume she didn’t know where England was.
I have a friend (an American through and through) who used to think I could drive down from Massachusetts to visit him in Washington D.C. for a day. He thought it was just a couple of hours away. I finally convinced him that it would be at least a six-hour drive. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to apply this knowledge to other cases: this summer I’ll be living in Los Angeles and he’ll be in San Francisco, and we’re back to “drive up and visit for a day.”
He also seems to be unaware that Massachusetts is north of New York City. We’ve made plans to meet there and I tell him I’m going to drive to Stamford CT, leave my car there and take the train into the city. He says, “but isn’t that way out of your way?” Maybe he’s confusing Massachusetts with Maryland?
He’s generally pretty smart, so I don’t know what the trouble is. Just clueless about geography, I guess.
People can be astonishingly ignorant, even about their own countries. My sister, who lives in New Mexico, sends me newspaper articles about people who refuse to accept New Mexico drivers’ licenses as I.D. because they are “foreign,” and cannot accept that NM is one of the 50 states.
The person who thought it outrageous is certainly not representative of the population as a whole, and was probably very old, or incredibly insular.
However, as someone who’s driven from Dublin to Galway, and also driven across the Great Plains a couple of times, there is a world of difference in the type of driving you have to do in Ireland compared to the wide open spaces of the US. Great Plains = lots of wide straight roads, a chilled out driving style, and amenities every half hour or so.
Dublin - Galway (which, to make you even more incredulous, is more like 4 hours, despite only being 135 miles) involves very little freeway, lots of twisty little roads, bumper-to-bumper hellacious traffic at very high speeds, few places where it’s safe to pass, tractors, trucks, people on bicycles, traffic jams in small villages, etc. etc. It’s about fifty times more unpleasant, takes all one’s concentration, and after such a journey I always had to spend about half an hour drinking tea and unwinding before I could do anything else.
Oh, yes. I went to school in NM for a year and a half and became well acquainted with this. Sometimes people would just sort of selectively here the “Mexico” part of the name but other times it just would not sink in.
WRT the scale thing, I can definitely understand how people just get confused. I was raised in New Jersey, lived for a year and a half in New Mexico (which is about eight gajillion times larger than NJ), and am now in Ireland, which is about the size of West Virginia. Occasionally I’ll just have a lapse and think that things are either a lot further or a lot closer than the really are.
And of course, this is even more true when it IS Colorado, where a few centimeters may involve a great deal of up and down, which can make things much further.
I wasn’t driving or navigating after I moved from the East Coast to the West (I was 10), but my parents often got pretty screwed up directionally (for a couple years) because they were used to orienting themselves to the ocean.
Can’t you get a more accurate rate by pulling out cash on a local ATM? I know that when I was in Israel everyone I was with could pull out shekels from their dollar-stocked American bank accounts.
Wouldn’t the thing being in English tip them off? Dumbasses.
Again WRT to scale, I’ve lived in a very small state and a very big state and a moderately big state, and I sometimes get a little spun around too. Having spent all of my adult life in big, open Western states, I tend to lend Eastern states a lot more size than they’re due even though I know logically–having lived in one–that they’re not that big. I always do a little bit of a mental double-take when someone talks about driving from one state to another like a normal commute–I know from experience (my parents used to take me back and forth between Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia like nothing) that there’s nothing odd about it, but having lived in California/Arizona for a while I get an image of driving from San Diego to Las Vegas, or from LA to Phoenix, etc.
Of course, but on a business trip when I’ll be paying cash for maybe one or two taxi rides at most, and the company is picking up the tab anyway, I used to not bother. Since I started travelling to the continent more I have lots more euros passing through my hands, so it’s not an issue any more - I usually have €20-€50 in my wallet at any one time. Must go to Ireland again sometime - havent been there for years…
Then there was the time that some guy insisted that Nebraska was on the border with Canada, even after I reminded him I lived there 18 years before I left… Or the time I brought a friend home to Omaha and he wanted to do a day trip to Mount Rushmore (in his defense, Texas really is so huge that everything to the north and east of it appear to be teeny-tiny little states. Still, Omaha to Mount Rushmore is more like 8 hours of driving.)