Wasn’t that on Full House? I don’t have that much experiance with tourists confused at local stuff (other than explaining how to buy booze in PA), but my senior year of high school we almost had to change our senior trip (Disney World) because of 9/11. Niagra Falls was shot down by the school board because it was a foreign country. As was Puerto Rico! This from people in charge running a school district. We ended up going to Disney World any with one chaparone (the school nurse) bringing her passport so she could go to EPCOT.
Well, that’s just criminally stupid.
Here’s the difference between Europeans and Americans: Europeans think 100 miles is far. Americans think 100 years is old.
Well, part of Niagara Falls is in Canada, so they weren’t completely wrong.
No kidding. Watching a French exchange student yawning his way through Old Sturbridge Village was infuriating, though I understood some of the reasons for it. 
I am always appalled at the amount of geographical (and cultural) ignorance in the world, especially among Americans. I have attempted to educate my children in all of our travels. For our first family trip from Maryland to California, I was having a hard time getting the kids to comprehend the distances we would cover in driving from San Francisco to Anahiem for our stay at Disneyland. I finally got out a map of California and drew, to scale, an outline of the state of Maryland. The state fits quite nicely within the east-west borders of California, and you can line up a whole bunch of Marylands between Oregon and Mexico going North to South!
The London Underground has a couple of express-type arrangements. Take a look on the map at the Metropolitain and Jubillee lines (purple & grey). They run on the same route between Finchley Road and Wembley Park, but only one calls at intermediate stops. Similarly the Piccadilly and District (dark blue & green), between Hammersmith and Acton Town. Also, the Metropolitan has some trains which don’t call at all station further out to the north-west.
It’s a great shame they didn’t name it after the greatest Doncastrian of them all, Thomas Crapper…
Hee! That reminds me of when my daughter Whiterabbit was five years old, and we drove from Ohio to Disney World. We explained to her at length that we would get in the car in the morning and drive all day long, and then sleep in a motel that night and then do it all over again the next day. And to not ask how far we’d gone until tomorrow afternoon because it’s going to take us two whole days to get there.
So ten minutes down from the road as we set off from our house came the eternal refrain from the back seat: “Are we almost there yet?” 
(She was, of course, only five years old, so at least she had an excuse, unlike the idiot adults in so many stories in this thread!)
The key is that he was ALREADY on the wrong plane. He was on Air New Zealand’s flight that goes London – Los Angeles – Auckland, coming from London. He was supposed to connect in Los Angeles to a flight to Oakland. Upon landing in L.A., they announced that people continuing to Auckland were to remain on board. He misheard, and the rest is history.
I remember the story well; it made all the papers here.
Ed
It is possible that they were just having a moment. Mr. Stuff, who is not stupid, an idiot, or any of the other epithets that have been slung around in this thread, had such a moment as we were leaving my brother’s house in Toronto.
I was driving, since he’s always been a country boy, and that many cars in so small an area makes him sweat. He knew we needed to be heading south to go home. He was deeply distressed that we were heading toward the lake and kept telling me to turn around. I finally figured out what his problem was and yelled, “We’re in Canada! Be quiet!” He’s always lived south of Cleveland, and it’s deeply embedded in his DNA that THE LAKE IS NORTH.
He knows where Toronto is. He just kind of had a moment.
I have them myself sometimes, but don’t tell anyone.
It’s worse when you’re dealing with natives! I used to work for a company in the San Francisco Bay area. After the third time headquarters in Massachussetts sent my stuff to L.A. instead of my office, I called the secretary who was mailing it to complain. She said, “Oh, I was sending things to California anyway, so I just included your stuff in their package. Can’t you drive over and get it.” She just didn’t grok that it was 400 miles away. To her, it was all California.
I agree that Irish retailers are for the most part thieving fucks, or in the Cork lingo, “cute hoors”, but I should point out that I am one of those English imperialist pigdogs to whom you refer, but one who is rather disappointed in my fellow countrymen with regard to their yawning abyss of knowlege about the independent country of Ireland (many, many more examples on request), and furthermore, I dare you to go into your local flying-the-England-flag butchers, order un demi-kilo of saucissons, then try to pay for them in yoyos.
Something like “no way, Glasgow to Toronto is 3300 miles, whereas Toronto to Vancouver is 2100 miles?”
If you want, I can give examples of Englanders unsure about whether their money could be used in Cardiff.
Heh. To which the correct answer is that while their money is welcome, they themselves won’t be
As if I didn’t know.
Well, you live and learn. From your stance in Irish threads before now, I’d always assumed that if being English were a crime, there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict you. Ignorance fought, I shall delete one word from my often-felt-but-too-polite-to-articulate “Well, fuck off [del]back[/del] to Ireland, then”. 
My local butchers would probably accept payment in pre-decimal currency, but in their defence, they retail the kind of meat seldom seen since the days of £sd, and I’d never dream of trying to palm off toytown money on them. As for sausages, I can’t think of them in French any more without remembering the best French tongue-twister ever: Si six scies scient six saucissons, six cent soixante-six scies scient six cent soixante-six saucissons.
Besides, who’d buy un demi-kilo when the French themselves buy livres?
With a kiss to Shirley and other wonderful travel agents.
One of my worst pains has actually been travel agents. Many people get into anything that sounds like sales or customer service (including travel agent) thinking that it’s the same to sell at a dime store that to get flight tickets for corporate travelers or the best computer for a family of a specific composition (“family of five” doesn’t necessarily mean “mom, dad and three kids under age 12”).
Between travel agents who didn’t realize that Visa requirements for Spanish citizens are not the same as Visa requirements for US citizens; HR managers who think that EU citizens need permits to move between EU countries; foreigners of many different nationalities and ways of employment who thought that:
- everybody in Spain dances flamenco (I’m from the goddamn North and I bloody well don’t!)
- all of Spain is a beach except the three tiny spaces occupied by a bullring, a flamenco nightclub and a souvenir store
- Ibiza, Catalonia and Madrid are independent extradimensional entities
- Toledo is the name of a sword
et al,
I sometimes wish God had skipped on inventing geography!
Nava, don’t feel too badly about the world ignorance of certain U.S. travel agents - when I worked for the U.S. Government, I was sent to Baltimore on business for a week at the last minute. We were required by our travel policy to use a specific travel agency, and to book rooms at a negotiated government rate. The trouble was there were no rooms available at that rate that week in Baltimore or anywhere remotely close. The travel agency repeatedly tried to book me a room in Boston, on the theory that everything on the East Coast is close together.
Sigh.
One thing that’s changed enormously in most of Europe over the last few decades is driving times.
Door-to-door times, including pit stops, Pamplona to Barcelona (about 500 km, I’m too lazy to convert to miles), without breaking any speed laws. Time ranges are given due to differences in driving conditions (driving a narrow road over a mountain in the middle of December is not quite the same as doing it in August, whereas once the big tunnels through the mountain got built there wasn’t such a difference) and traffic.
40 years ago: 16-20 hours. No highways, no tunnels.
30 years ago: 12-14 hours. No highways; a big tunnel through a mountain.
Now: 4-5 hours. Highway all the way; The Mountain Pass From Hell is merely a legend for people zooming by on the 4-laner. So not quite a day trip but if you’re in that much of a hurry you can do it.
Oh, I know - like I mentioned, most of the touristy stuff you get it from people from all over the world.
Pity I’m not at home.
Last weekend, the newspaper’s Sunday magazine had a clip about a webpage a Japanese started working on after a Texan asked him “how long’s it to drive to Japan from heah?” The map is completely based on geographical mistakes he’s collected in his travels.
In his map, Spain and Portugal are next to each other (hallellujah), but Spain is “right next to Colombia” (like a Harvard lawyer once told me) in what’s known in some circles as “Venezuela” and Portugal is east of Spain-zuela. We had a lot of fun with that map. I’ll look it up when I go home next weekend.