No kidding? You could have fooled me. 
My coworkers are going to start giving me fishy looks if I keep rocking back and forth with no sound. 
Gah, of course… I was just in London last month. I guess I forgot about it because they don’t call it an express line, they call it two different lines, unlike NY.
What is it with Germans? Friends of my mother, also from Germany, similarly thought that if they flew into the Toronto airport that we could drive from Saskatoon to pick them up. :rolleyes:
I have driven from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. (approximately 4 to 5 hours driving) to have dinner with a friend, and then turned around and come home. Leave Pittsburgh at noon, arrive in Washington at around 5 pm, have dinner, leave Washington around 9 pm and get home sometime between 1 and 2 am.
It can be done in a day. It’s actually fun.
Now driving from Pittsburgh, PA to New York City and back in 24 hours is not so much fun, since it’s about 7 hours each way.
My sister was dating a guy from England, and his parents came over to visit us in Atlanta. When we asked them if they’d like to take any side trips, they said “oh, since we’ll be here the whole week, we thought we’d drive to New York and L.A. and Chicago.” :rolleyes:
Oh, I just remembered something amusing I saw on my trip to Hawaii. We were in the national park at the hotel Volcano House, and passed a scruffy-looking guy shouting into a payphone: “Hey! Yeah, I’m in Maui. . . . Maui . . . you know, in Hawaii . . . the place with the volcanoes?” I considered telling him he was on the wrong island, but decided against it. Let him find out on his own.
Well, we’re used to driving pretty fast. 
Seriously, even though by European standards Germany itself is a big country, the sheer size of Canada is hard to grasp for Central Europeans. When I first learned that the train from Toronto to Saskatoon took two days, I was stunned.
So basically it comes down to the same kind of geographical ignorance as with all other stories in this thread.
Me and my friends would’ve totally blown them away. We do San Francisco <–> Vancouver non-stop, usually one person driving. Hey if you leave around 6am you can usually have enough time to get completely sloshed before the 2am last call, and jeez, with the 4am last call you can even sleep in a little. 
I had a friend who did San Jose <–> Newark (NJ) non-stop alone, and still managed to go out and party right after he arrived. His axle broke in Wyoming on the way back though, totalled his truck.
My dad’s Charley Chuckles-style colleague once visited the new aquarium in Chattanooga.
The next day, my dad asked him: “How was the aquarium?” (You can guess what’s coming.)
“Too many fish.”
Heh, I have a similar problem after living most of my life on the east coast of the US and now living in the Netherlands. I simply cannot seem to get it through my head that THE OCEAN IS WEST. Everybody knows that you go east to get to the ocean.
It’s the same with the direction of the sun and Australians. We in the northern hemisphere know that the noonday sun indicates the south. To an Australian it indicates north. I once had a fairly heated argument with an Australian work colleague when we were trying to find a telephone access manhole. This was indicated on our instruction sheet as so many yards north of a particular road junction. I was pointing one way, he the other.
I’m from the Toronto area, and it’s equally-deeply embedded in my DNA that The Land Ends At Water In The Direction Of South (More Or Less), Beyond Which Is A Border And Another Land. That water may be a river, a medium-size lake, or a Really Big Lake. The phrase “Bridge to USA” is embedded in my travelling soul.
Then my sister moved to Ottawa, which has water and a border on the north. At times downtown, I would have a nice view of the Ottawa River and the hills of Quebec beyond, but I would feel vaguely that the sun was shining from the wrong direction.
The most disorienting thing about this was not so much the water on the north as the lack of a border on the south. I would feel that there was a space south of the city, into which it was about to slip, because there were no limits to restrain it.
Weirder was crossing the US/Canada border into rural Quebec: Outside the border post (a small building plopped in the middle of a two-lane road), the border was a fence stretching across the cornfields. It really brought home the arbitrariness of it all.
I haven’t had as much disorientation in environments that were physically very different, like Alberta or Europe. The most disorientation seems to occur in areas that look similar to what I’m used to, with one big difference.
This has very little to do with the OP, but when visiting Lake Superior, I kept waiting for the tide to go out.
More on-topic, after visiting Mexico, I think I speak for all halfway decent tourists when I say: if you feel infinitely superior to all Mexicans, maybe consider vacationing somewhere other than Mexico! Sheesh. I was shocked and embarrassed by the number of times fellow Americans would casually assume that I agreed with their pejoritive attitude about Mexicans while there. This included an asshole couple talking about how slow and shitty everything was, while being driven around in a passenger van by… a Mexican. Who spoke perfect English. Ugh.
Something like this happened to me in Denmark.
I was staying at someone’s apartment in Copenhagen with a day or so to kill. I decided to Make the Pilgrimage to Legoland, as I’d planned. So I set out around 9:30 and…
Rode the bus to the train station. (15 minutes)
Rode the train to another city, Vejle. (1.5 hours)
Rode the bus to my destination. (25 minutes)
No big deal, right? In terms of time, this was pretty much equivalent to my trip from Oakville across the Toronto area to visit my father in Oshawa: bus, train, bus. I’d even done that trip after work and come back the same evening (late).
So when I got back around 7PM, I described my day. My host was flabbergasted. “You went halfway across the country?” We looked at a map it was. But we North Americans tend to look at long-distance travel in terms of time, bot actual distance…
I do have to add, however, that I used to date a guy when I lived in Texas who grew up in Delaware and whose extended family was still back East.
They used to think it outrageous, also, to drive more than, say, 45 minutes for anything. He would tell me about how they wouldn’t go see some of his relatives unless it was a special occassion because they lived an hour away. (And in a whole 'nother state!!)
Then his nuclear family moved to Houston. Where an hour’s drive is a like a micro-second comparatively. Another guy I dated would drive from Austin to Lubbock for the weekend without batting an eye, a distance of 7 hours or so.
Thus, the East coast is the Europe of America.
I’m always amused by tourists who arrive here in Australia, jump off the plane and expect to see “The Outback”. “Well, see, it’s just not here at the airport - you actually have to drive a couple of days that way” I say, jerking my thumb westward. As if “The Outback” really exists anymore anyway!
Also, back inthe 80’s I loved tourists who are disappointed they can’t see more koalas. In the city. Standard response there is “yeah, they kinda got wiped out around here. I mean, they are good eatin’ and all, but there’s not a meal in one of them so you have to shoot 'em two at a time. Guess that’s made 'em kinda scarce”. Oh, the looks you’d get…
mm
Sometimes, people are ignorant of their local geography as well, believe it or not. At work last week, a man on a motorcycle came in asking the way to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Since I’m in north Mississippi, and he was from Birmingham, I had to tell him to go back the way he came.
Sounds like me in Spain. In a day I went halfway across Catalonia, almost to France, just to see one museum.
And the fact that I could hop a train from the capital of Galicia to the capital of one of its provinces FOR 2 EURO was mind-boggling. As was the idea of a train (from Barcelona to Valencia) you had to reserve in advance not because it was expensive, but because it was full.
Update:
I got an email from one of the women today (the nice one). They did stay in Santo Domingo (what a surprise!) and according to she still liked the country despite the initial problem. She added “I want to thank you again for your graciousness and understanding. I learned a lot for next time including who to choose as a travel partner!”. I am glad she had a good time after all. She seemed like a really nice person, if only a bit clueless.