Wife and I spent 4 days in Boston over 4th of July weekend. Hadn’t been there since '04.
We were walking and got discombobulated and forgot our touristy little map we had. After a meal I asked the hostess which way we’d have to walk from the restaurant to get to Boston Harbor. We knew we were close.
She had no idea.
After some questions I learned she’s lived in Boston for 32 years yet, because she’s never been there, has no idea which way we needed to walk to head towards the harbor. :eek:
Then we talked to the waiter. 25 years for him. He wasn’t sure either. :rolleyes:
Then we talked to some other guy working there and he got into an argument with a waitress because they each told us to walk in opposite directions. :smack:
Sigh. We just walked. It was 8 freaking blocks away. We just needed to know which direction to walk as we exited the place. Was no biggie. It’s just that Boston Harbor isn’t the only one and we wanted that one specifically.
But Really? Really? This is not the first time in our many travels we’ve encountered this. Are people really this dopey. You don’t know where anything is, especially major things?
Well, don’t come to Denver and ask me how to get to anything.
I’ve lived here 44 years. I do know how to get most everyplace. However, I can’t tell you. I don’t know why.
I can TRY, but I will get something just horribly wrong if it’s more than a couple of blocks away. I would probably be able to lead you there, but I can’t tell you.
I am also just shit at following other people’s directions when I don’t know how to get there.
My husband and I used to joke that we would never have to stop and ask anyone for directions. Him because, one, he’s a man, and two, he’s never lost, or if he is, he instinctively knows how to get unlost. Me because, even if they gave me directions, I would sooner or later screw them up. But I will usually get there, even if I accidentally go someplace else first.
But do you know how to get to major land marks? Especially when they’re 8 blocks away from where you work? And do you work in a tourist area in a customer service job?
I’m incredulous that none of them had a clue. We just needed to know whether to go left or right out the door. They seemed worried I’d step on the breadcrumbs they’d left to find their way back home!
The one that always confused me was when someone would stop me to ask where something is, I point and say something like, “It’s that building there” or “It’s on the back side of this block” or “Go up two blocks and make a left, it will be on your right”, and then the person just keeps wandering around. Like, the majority of the time, they don’t go where you were just pointing, they start walking in some random direction.
I mean sure, if I gave you twenty lines of instructions or didn’t point the direction to start walking, I might understand. But “it’s that building there”? C’mon people.
You’re a tourist. You want to see tourist crap. Locals don’t give two shits in a hurricane about tourist crap. Locals know where the real stuff is, the stuff they need to live, and it damned well ain’t the stuff you’re gonna buy an overpriced postcard of. Had you asked about good restaurants, they’d have given you a list of places ranked by something other than how much the owners were able to bribe the guidebook makers.
And, as Hilarity N. Suze implies, there’s a difference between procedural memory and declarative memory. To wit: Declarative memory is “What color are your shoes?”, procedural memory is “How do you tie your shoelaces?” It is almost cartoonishly difficult to verbally convey procedural memory, especially the really ingrained stuff you do without much conscious thought.
Um, yeah. Don’t turn this on us. They’re dopes. It was 8 blocks to the ocean, not some creek. Just needed to know which way to walk out the door as it was getting dark and we didn’t want to waste time going the wrong way.
I have a good old fashioned dinosaur Smart Talk flip phone. Full bars but no map apps. My wifes precious smart phone had no signal for whatever reason. I razzed her about how at least I could make a phone call.
In my experience a large majority of people have no idea where they are most of the time. The entire 22 mile eastern border of Chicago is Lake Michigan coastline. Ask anyone who’s lived here for any length of time and I’ll bet only 20% can point in the direction of the lake. Mind you, they only have to point east, wherever in the city they may be.
A lot of people don’t think cardinally. Stop a random person on the street and ask them to point north. About 10% of people will be able to do it instantly with no hesitation. About 40% of people will take a few minutes to struggle through and eventually arrive at the right answer. The other 50% of people will have no idea and couldn’t derive it if their life depended on it. If you’re a naturally cardinally oriented person, it can seem baffling to you how others don’t operate in the same frame of mind as you.
My wife has absolutely no idea which direction anything is, or where it is.
She can, however, tell you to turn right or left at the door, and at every point after to arrive at the destination. She just has no idea what direction that takes you.
And if she wants to go, say, straight ahead, she has no idea that left-right-right-left leaves you pointing in the same direction.
People stop me in the city centre and ask for directions to places. Our city is small and has a ridiculous one-way traffic system that seems to be permanently having bits upgraded and pedestrianised. Plus we have six weeks of major gas pipe replacement through a central cross-section, which means some days you can go up the road but not down, or down but not up.
The worst thing is that people who want directions are driving…I hardly ever drive into the city because parking is a nightmare, and we have a very good bus service from where I live.
So no, I can’t easily tell you how to get to whatever place you’re looking for by car. I can tell you how to walk to it, or possibly even which bus goes there, but not if you’re driving because I’d most likely send you the wrong way up a one-way street with a newly-pedestrianised section that’s closed to anything except emergency vehicles.
This part of the rant sort of makes sense, except I’m not sure what qualifies that particular restaurant as being in “a tourist area”.
I work in a fairly large hospital and often am stopped by visitors asking how to get somewhere. Generally I can help them find key landmarks (i.e. the emergency dept., the Subway’s outlet etc.) but if they need precise directions to find Laser Toe Surgery or some other service that I don’t interact with on a daily basis, they’ll need to head over to the information desk.*
*I really should have a scrub top with the logo “I may look like I know where stuff is, but I don’t”.
I lived in London for 33 years (and worked in central London for 7 years.)
I knew the Underground (Tube) extremely well (especially the interchange stations.)
I knew where the best restaurants and the comfortable cinemas were.
But I hadn’t visited the tourist attractions, because I could do that any day I felt like it.
The first time I visited Madame Tussauds was only after 30 years living in London - because my aunt wanted to see it.
The first time I took an open-top bus ride around London was 20 years after I had left - because friends from Vegas wanted to do that.
How exactly did you phrase the question? Is it possible that they thought you were looking for a specific tourist spot called Boston Harbor rather than asking for the general direction of the bay?
I’ve posted before about my whole family’s total lack of any sense of direction. It’s genetic, and I blame it on the Howards–one of Boston’s founding families. I think some ancestors went looking for that nice picnic spot right outside the city, and gave up when they hit what is now Ohio, thus becoming the political side of the family.
When I worked in real estate, I learned how to give directions. I probably could have learned Yiddish, Russian or Korean easier.
There’s just a part of our brains that is missing.
I wonder if it’s one of those situations where there are a few routes to the harbor, some better if you’re walking, some better to drive, and perhaps some better depending on which part of the harbor you want to end up in when you get there.
If someone asks for directions, I may know where the landmark is, but may not have a good idea how best to get there from my current location if it’s somewhere I don’t normally travel to.
I’ve lived in this small city for eight years. The other day someone passing through asked me where the post office is. I had no idea.
I’ve discovered, when car-tripping, to never ask a clerk at a convenience store where anything is. She lives in a town 20 miles away and only knows how to commute to work. Always ask a customer, not a clerk.
Yeah I’m another one who has a poor sense of direction. If you have a visual map in your head, you just can’t envision what it’s like for the rest of us. Over time and dint of much effort I have gotten much better, but one of the things that really annoys me about my GPS is it says “Go NW out of the parking lot”. After that it will give me street names, but hell if I know which way NW is.
I really do my best and I am pretty good at the city I live in, but I would be extremely leery of giving tourists directions. I know the river is east, for example, and run most of my life through that. But if you asked me a specific place, I’d probably look it up. I don’t like giving directions.
Like for example one of the biggest tourist destinations here is the museum and Empire Plaza. If you asked me how to drive there, I could tell you. If you stopped me downtown and asked me how to walk there…um, I’d have a hard time.
I consider myself to have better than average spacial ability, but I now struggle with this also. I think it has to do with local … geometry for lack of a better term. For example: I spent the first half of my life in California where most places have grid street systems and you have to two major highways (Hwy 99 and Interstate 5) running in parallel north to south. I figured out at a young age that if I ever got lost I could go either east or west and run into a highway, ocean or mountains. But more likely since I lived in the Central Valley, I would hit one of the highways first. But somehow as I grew up this developed into a pretty accurate 3-D map of the local geography in my head, so I could instantly point north or whatever.
Then I moved to Virginia, where few of the streets and highways are straight. You can turn south on a road and end up north of where you started. Because the city street networks are random instead of grids (except in DC proper), all of the houses and buildings face every possible random direction. From looking at Google Maps I know that my house is NNE of my office, but standing here right now I’d struggle to point north. My route from my office to my home entails going (I think) west, north, east, north, east, south, east, north…