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A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco
- vmception 6y agohe still pays taxes on the gifted land :) thats very interesting not that there is a tax, but that the collector has still been in contact with him or his estate
- ilamont 6y agoThere was a story some years back about a guy who got on the wrong flight to Oakland ... he ended up in Auckland instead. https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/27/us/wrong-flight-passengers-trnd https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/27/us/wrong-flight-passengers-tr...
- InitialLastName 6y agoThere is a similar classic (much less expensive) mistake between New York Penn Station and Newark Penn Station, which are consecutive stops on the Amtrak line NYC.
- smabie 6y agoIt can be a more expensive mistake than you think... I would sometimes see Chinese tourists get off at Newark station and always wondered if a) they made a mistake b) they ended up okay. Newark isn't a fun place to be at night.
- InitialLastName 6y agoLuckily, there's another train to the city in 10 mins. Plus, these days the area around Newark Penn is nicer than the area around New York Penn.
- swiley 6y agoMan that sounds like something I would do. I'm born here and ride Amtrack often too.
- InitialLastName 6y agoI had a brief panic about it the first time I took the train to NYC (in high school) because all I knew was that I had to get off the train at "Penn Station" and I saw that on a sign as we were pulling out of the Newark station.
- madcaptenor 6y agoAt one point they were thinking of renaming the big station in Philadelphia, 30th Street Station, after Ben Franklin, but they didn't do it. One reason I heard because they were afraid people would call it "Ben Station" and get it confused with the New York and Newark stations. (Also, Newark, Delaware is on the same line! But not many trains stop there.)
- w-m 6y agoIn Germany we had this woman (unsuccessfully) suing a travel organization for booking her a ticket to Bordeaux, when she phoned them to book one to Porto: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/bordeaux-statt-porto-frau-bucht-auf-saechsisch-falsches-flugziel-11890813.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/bordeaux-statt-port... Bit less fun because she didn’t actually board the plane. But nevertheless met with a lot of glee at the time, as the Saxon dialect is known for the soft consonants, and everybody likes to poke a little fun at it.
- schoen 6y agoIt seems that whenever I try to order something "mit Hummus" at a kebab shop (ah, pre-pandemic) in German with my American accent, they give me Pommes instead. :-)
- triceratops 6y agoPretty sure that happened in an episode of Full House too.
- RegnisGnaw 6y agoI lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (eh?) for 23 years and we have similar stories. There is an island that is part of Nova Scotia called Cape Breton with a city named Sydney (so Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada) with population of ~30K. Every few years we get a tourist that confuses that with Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. They generally realize something is wrong when they switch planes in Halifax from a Jet (Boeing 737, Airbus 320, etc) to a 19 person turboprop for the last few hundred kilometers to Sydney. News Articles: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2172858.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2172858.stm https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/italian-tourists-end-up-in-wrong-sydney-1.975605 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/italian-tourists-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/31/teen-accidentally-flies-to-sydney-nova-scotia-australia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/31/teen-accidenta... Wikipedia Link: Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney,_Nova_Scotia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney,_Nova_Scotia Sydney, New South Wales, Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney
- smnrchrds 6y agoSaint John, New Brunswick and St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador must confuse people too. I never remember which one is which without Googling it.
- EponymousMoth 6y agoAm from Saint John. Every time I tell someone from away where I'm from, I make sure to tell them "The one without the 's'."
- hpkuarg 6y agoAin't John?
- CydeWeys 6y agoThere's also a St John, Virgin Islands.
- baron816 6y ago> Kreuz, who typically enjoyed drinking 17 beers a day This was the point where I was hooked
- shimonabi 6y agoRemember, that was the time when being an alcoholic was still considered funny.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adonovan 6y agoAlso, beer was 3.3% ABV when I was in college in the UK, so intake matches renal clearance. By contrast, a session of today’s “session beer” can be practically life threatening.
- ilamont 6y agoBelgian friend had a brewery job in Leuven when he was younger and said free beer and frequent tastings were part of the job.
- Ericson2314 6y agoAnd perhaps during the time your friend had that job, it was the sole country the beer was good and varied enough to make that worth it.
- w-m 6y agoI wonder if someone already converted his beer consumption into American beer units, or whether he really drank 17 German beers. Because at 0,5l a beer, that wouldn’t leave much else to do all day.
- wil421 6y agoA can of normal American beer is 12oz. A 0.5l beer is equal to about 16oz so he actually drank more than 17 American beers. I assume the newspapers asked him how much he drank and the reply was 17 beers a day. Highly doubtful they did some kind of conversation.
- Spooky23 6y agoI used to work in a State Capitol, and would occasionally run into confused tourists in strange places, or very much lost. They were always Chinese or German and I’d run into them two or three times a year. One couple thought they were in Niagara Falls. Another somehow found themselves stuck in a secured employee parking garage. The strangest one was a person on a self guided tour who took a wrong turn and ended up wandering into a very unsafe neighborhood where I parked. I think the root cause was a badly translated tour book or itinerary. The one of the Germans bought me a beer and definitely had an imperfect understanding of the geography!
- reaperducer 6y agoBack when I still worked in the office, one day I found a lost Chinese couple wandering around campus. The tourism app they got in China told them it was a shopping mall. This was right after Siri became able to do verbal translations, so that's how we communicated. I was very surprised and impressed how well it worked.
- starpilot 6y agoI went on a date with a Mexican girl who spoke no English. Google translate app worked incredibly well for two-way translation. I mean it was perfect. She had been dependent on it her whole time in the US.
- willcipriano 6y ago>Another somehow found themselves stuck in a secured employee parking garage. Note to self, if in a secure area of a government facility without permission pretend to be a German tourist.
- Apocryphon 6y agoWholesome story. Pretty great how welcoming everyone in the story is.
- mandragon 6y agoIs Hacker News siloed properly? Plain sight seems required. Cc: heat
- mandragon 6y agoconnect s:b's,,command::ts;hwep..sting
- spiritplumber 6y agowhat's going on here?
- 1f60c 6y agoPerl.
- FounderBurr 6y agos///
- jtsiskin 6y agoWhat? Is this GPT-3?
- joshu 6y agoimagine making a mistake 44 years ago and never hearing the end of it!
- standardUser 6y agoAt least it came with some perks!
- davidw 6y agoHad a friend come visit us in Padova who wanted to see Venice, but ended up getting off in Mestre, which is kind of a newer, more industrial, and not particularly nice place. I still feel bad about not being able to take the day and actually show him around Venice myself.
- eCa 6y agoTo be fair, it's a ten minute train ride from Mestre to Venice, so slightly easier to correct than Maine->SF. But I don't understand why the station is sometimes(always?) called Venezia Mestre. Anyone going to Mestre on purpose knows where they are going, and no one going to Venice wants to get off at Mestre.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ArgyleSound 6y agoCheap hotels isn’t it
- schoen 6y agoA lot of European long-distance train stations are named like "Bigcity Neighborhoodname" or "Bigcity Suburbname". If you want to go downtown you really have to get used to booking (and watching for!) Bigcity Central/Centraal/Centrale/Sentral/Hbf/HB/H, or you can go very awry all over Europe... In Frankfurt, Germany, you also have to be additionally careful if a station is signed as Frankfurt(Main), because there (Main) indicates the major city on the River Main, as distinct from the other Frankfurt on the River Oder (along the border with Poland). For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_(Main)_S%C3%BCd_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_(Main)_S%C3%BCd_stat... is definitely not the main station of Frankfurt(Main). :-)
- 83457 6y agoNot sure how someone could make that mistake. In SF the water is on left and Maine the water is on right.
- mkl 6y agoIt's on the left in both, and on the right in both. It depends which way you're facing, and the sort of person making this mistake seems unlikely to know which way north is.
- khazhoux 6y agoClearly, a thing can't be both to your left and right side simultaneously -- that's a physical impossibility. In fact, to underscore this point, the Tony Bennet song "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" was written to remind people that water in SF is to their left.
- s0rce 6y agoits kinda on both if your standing on a peninsula. Although when you land at the airport you mostly see the bay and not the ocean at the same time
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mkl 6y agoNo one said anything about simultaneous. Stand on a beach, any beach in the world, looking straight out at the water. Turn 90 degrees left; now the water is on the right. Look straight out again, then turn 90 degrees right; now the water is on the left. Tada! You have just done the "impossible".
- ericsoderstrom 6y ago(hint: it's a joke)
- sanj 6y agoI witnessed a poor chap at the ticket counter at Dulles airport desperately trying to convince someone to flag him a taxi to drive him to Dallas to make his meeting.
- mikewarot 6y agoMy wife and I learned the hard way that Dulles is NOT in Washington DC, we took the bus out to the Air and Space Museum, which we assumed was in DC... the $75 dollar taxi ride that took 1 1/2 hours to show up to pick us up was no fun. Fun Bonus Fact: We drove to DC, so we could have just driven there, but thought a cheap Bus round trip was more fun as we could both see the sights, and not stress about traffic.
- nataz 6y agoThe more famous Smithsonian Air and Space museum is in D.C. right on the national mall, maybe 10 min from national airport (technicality in virginia, but right next to DC). You visited the udvar-hazy center which is out by Dulles airport in Chantilly. It is still part of the smithsonian, but more focused on displaying lots of different aircraft in a few large hangers. Very impressive and worth a visit, but not the main air and space facility. Either you had a legitimate miscommunication, or you got scammed by your driver. No one from around the DC metro would confuse the two.
- drdeadringer 6y agoLast time I was in DC, they had recently installed one of the space shuttles into the Dulles-area Smithsonian hanger. I was in "DC Central" and made a point to bus out to the off-site hanger for the space shuttle (and everything else there). Although I did my paranoid pre-trip research [partial thanks to dad], I can understand the confusion.
- adventured 6y agoTwo of my favorite photos from Udvar-Hazy of the Shuttle Enterprise from a trip there many years ago. They had recently restored and placed it on display (this was around ~2003), prior to moving it to NYC years later. Shuttle Discovery is in its place now. https://i.imgur.com/rvgjnn9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rvgjnn9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DrItbeK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DrItbeK.jpg
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ipaddr 6y agoKind of a sad story. On the first visit everyone is so happy. On the third visit no one cared. The rise and quick fall of vanishing fame can be hard to manage. The problem with fame is, it is never based on who you are it is based on an association to an idea. His best hope was to move in 1977 hopefully extending the spotlight a little further. Remember Greta Thunberg? Covid pushed her forever from the spotlight.
- jeromegv 6y agoThere's also the classic of people leaving for San Jose Costa Rica and landing in San Jose California. Happened to a friend of mine, he wasn't too embarrassed by it because he shared the whole story on Facebook
- dbcurtis 6y agoDon’t know if it is still true, but Alaska used to have a daily flight from San Jose to San Jose. I always found that amusing when I saw the monitor waiting for my Portland (Oregon) flight.
- umeshunni 6y agoThey still sell that flight though there's a stop in LAX now.
- jcranmer 6y agoI've almost done the reverse. I avoided actually booking the flight because I was trying to figure out why it was routing me from Illinois to Miami to get to California...
- acwan93 6y agoIt's funny how often this actually happens: 2013: https://elpeji.com/2013/12/03/study-abroad-gringa-takes-five-days-to-realize-shes-in-california/ https://elpeji.com/2013/12/03/study-abroad-gringa-takes-five... 2017: https://www.reddit.com/r/SanJose/comments/5lqnxb/redditor_books_flight_to_san_jose_ca_by_mistake/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SanJose/comments/5lqnxb/redditor_bo... And the opposite, landing in San Jose, CR https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/san-jose-travel-plane-airplane-lufthansa-nightmare-12477144.php https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/san-jose-travel-plane-...
- 333c 6y agoThe first link very much reads like a satire piece a la The Onion. Are you sure that's real?
- marshmallow_12 6y agoI have heard that Americans are terrible at geography (no offense), but this is really quite extreme... Edit: ok, some people got offended.
- tclancy 6y agoAre you suggesting we should have put Bangor somewhere else? As a New England resident, I am open to this idea.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoI'm ashamed to say that i didn't bother reading the article. I thought it was current. I deserve those downvotes. As to your idea, in Old England you don't have to even put up with Bangor. Maybe you should consider moving? I might be open to that suggestion:)
- DiabloD3 6y agoI live 45 minutes away from Bangor. You are free to move it somewhere else, I approve.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoClueless as to why my last comment got flagged [edit:my reply to yours, though i do think the other flag is also a bit ott]. Did i offend you? If so, it was inadvertent and i'm sorry. The parent was offensive, this one just a little tounge-in-cheek.
- tclancy 6y agoMe? Definitely not. Not sure I’ve ever flagged a comment.
- sbierwagen 6y agoSpeaking of fun things named Bangor, there was Naval Submarine Base Bangor, the primary sub base for the US Navy strategic nuclear missile submarine fleet... of the Pacific ocean! It was renamed to Naval Base Kitsap in 2004, and is a couple dozen miles outside Seattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Base_Kitsap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Base_Kitsap
- ericmay 6y agoThis reminds of a story I vaguely recall of a lady in Europe who followed GPS directions which took her to Italy or something from Belgium, instead of the airport 30 minutes away. Might be fuzzy on the details or truth of that story.
- Clewza313 6y agoIt was, incredibly, even worse than that: she meant to drive 90 miles, but ended up going from Belgium to Croatia, a distance of over 900 miles: https://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/woman-drives-900-miles-gps-error-181605523.html https://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/woman-drives-900-miles... You'd think she'd twig on during the 2nd day of driving...
- ericmay 6y agoGosh. So crazy to read about again. Thanks for digging up that link!
- Ichthypresbyter 6y agoIn 2019, an elderly Italian immigrant living in Newcastle, England, got into his Jaguar to make his annual trip to Rome to visit relatives. He had made the journey by car several times before, but that year was the first time that he tried to use his new satellite navigation system. When he stopped for fuel, the satnav stopped giving him directions, so he asked someone in the petrol station for help. Unfortunately, the helpful passer-by had misunderstood and entered the small Bavarian village of Rom, 1000 miles north of Rome, as the destination. The driver noticed that the roads he was following were unfamiliar, but assumed that the satnav had mapped out a better route. To make matters worse, when he arrived in Rom and got out of the car to try to figure out what had gone wrong, he didn't apply the handbrake properly. The car rolled backwards, injuring him as he was dragged along the road by the door, before colliding with the village sign (and being written off as a total loss).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- heelix 6y agoThere was a time where I use to fly internationally very frequently. Very use to having the manager sort out the car/flight/hotel with our travel agent - so for the most part I just grabbed the tickets and go. Manager asked me - can you go to London? It was pretty cold in Minnesota, and London sounded nice. Turned brain off, got on the flight, and landed way too early. London, Canada... ffs, and it was even colder than home. Never even crossed my mind to check which London.
- geocrasher 6y agoJust be glad they didn't send you to Paris TX or Rome, GA. Edit: I forgot Memphis, TN.
- fma 6y agoAs a Georgia resident...we have Rome, Ga AND Athens Ga so you can take a nice trip through European cities a few hours apart. And a Gainesville, Ga not to be confused with a Gainesville, Florida. We also have a Houston County...which is not pronounced the same as Houston, Texas (it is pronounced like house-ten) Also a Decatur, GA not to be confused with Decatur, Alabama. That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
- ThinkingGuy 6y agoWe're also home to not one, but two Buckheads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhead,_Georgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhead,_Georgia
- quercusa 6y agoThere's also Cairo, not to be confused with Illinois or Egypt, as well as Albany (not to be confused with NY).
- Qworg 6y agoDifferent pronunciations - if you're going to kay-row, you're going to Illinois.
- geocrasher 6y agoMy first job was at a Staples office supply store in a town known for its tourism and glitz and glamour. Several times in my 15 months at that store, a German tourist would be seen wandering around the store, clearly lost. More than once they asked, in broken English, "where is the Milk?" staple /ˈstāpəl/ plural noun: staples 1. a main or important element of something, especially of a diet. "bread, milk, and other staples" Considering that the Office Supply store was called Staples, and the local grocery stores were Alpha Beta, Vons, and Ralphs, one could understand their confusion!
- unphased 6y agoIt's funny that you did the German capitalization of all nouns in that broken English quote! It does add a delightful German feel to the quote.
- smabie 6y agoAlpha Beta, Vons and Ralph's... I wonder what town you are referring to
- geocrasher 6y agoI don't like posting specifics about myself online, but it was in the Coachella Valley in California
- ma2rten 6y agoWas this a very long time ago? Staples is a well known chain of office supply stores in Germany as well.
- Xcelerate 6y agoOn my first trip to New York City, I immediately turned my iPhone on upon landing (it was night outside) and had a very brief moment of panic that I had somehow boarded the wrong flight when the iPhone weather app said I was in "Jamaica".
- ciabattabread 6y agoAnd JFK is not even in the actual neighborhood of Jamaica. It’s just an artifact of how the postal codes were assigned - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Queens_neighborhoods#Postal_mail,_ZIP_Codes,_and_neighborhoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Queens_neighborhoods#P...
- Xcelerate 6y agoSFO is also weird like that. It’s technically part of the city despite being physically separated from it. The first time I landed there I could see out the window as we were landing and I thought “this sure doesn’t like look San Francisco”.
- sib 6y agoI almost got caught by a similar issue when booking travel to San Jose California when the travel web site prioritized San Jose Costa Rica (SJO) over SJC.
- w0mbat 6y agoIn the 1970s the British Museum in London borrowed King Tutankhamen's treasures, which had never before been seen outside Egypt. People flocked to see the exhibition from all over the world. Quite often tourists would get into a London taxi and say "Take me to Tutankhamen", and then find themselves in South London, at Tooting Common.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Ichthypresbyter 6y agoMore recently, in 2008 an Earl's daughter tried to book a taxi to take her from the family estate in Northamptonshire to Stamford Bridge (the stadium in London which is home to Chelsea FC). Instead, the taxi took her to Stamford Bridge (the village in Yorkshire which was the site of a famous battle in 1066).
- rafaelc 6y ago"Kreuz, who typically enjoyed drinking 17 beers a day, was a little groggy, and on hearing this, grabbed his suitcase, got off the plane, went through customs, jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take him to the city." My takeaway from the article was don't drink 17 beers a day
- mauvehaus 6y agoThe climbing guide book for Potrero Chico is quite clear that if you're flying in, you need to book a ticket to Monterrey, NL, MX, not Monterey, CA. I can only imagine.
- aurelius12 6y agoA number of years ago there was a guy from Korea (I think) coming to the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in San Jose, but ended up in San Jose, Costa Rica. He was quite distressed.
- ghaff 6y agoI don't think the person actually traveled there. But there's a small tech-oriented conference in Portland, ME and, in one of the earlier years of the conference, someone booked a flight to Portland, OR given that's where obviously a tech conference would be.
- parsecs 6y agoSorry but I don't really understand that last part - is Portland, OR a likely place for tech conferences to take place?
- ghaff 6y agoIt's not a super-common conference spot but it's where O'Reilly's OSCON mostly happened for many years pre-pandemic (when O'Reilly shut down their events business) for example. And there's a lot of other relatively low-level open source-adjacent activities there. Puppet Labs is located there for example. Certainly a bigger conference location than Portland, ME in general which I don't think even has a convention center and doesn't have more than regional flights into the airport.
- umanwizard 6y agoPortland, OR is just a much more major city than Portland, ME.
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoPortland OR gets a lot of tech conference businesses because it has a lot of techies and it’s affordable compared to any other city on the west coast (only Vancouver BC comes close). I seem to attend a conference or meeting there once every 2 years or so.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 6y agoShhh this conference is terrible and no one should consider going. <3
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI saw a guy in SF yelling "shut the fuck up" at his own reflection.
- gumby 6y agoIn the late 80s I left a wedding on Hawaii to fly home (change in Oahu). In those days you just walked out and climbed up into the plane. Well I paid no attention to anything, and only realised I’d flown to the wrong island when I couldn’t find my connecting flight. They were very understanding and sent me on my way. I’d actually forgotten about this but literally earlier this week was talking to the couple’s now adult kid and he mentioned he’d heard this story often as a kid! It was hardly newsworthy but apparently laugh-worthy.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThe best I can do is Amsterdam 2001, got off the train station in the city, couldn't find the hotel, grabbed a cab and told them the name of the hotel, took us to some suburb 5 miles away or something. Something was lost in translation there. Thought 'oh shit'. Got on a train back to the original point. Realised hotel was just on the other side of the square.
- landgenoot 6y ago"Lost in translation" in Amsterdam? The cab driver ripped you off
- quickthrower2 6y agoYeah I was being a bit dry there :-)
- supernova87a 6y agoEven worse, think about the thousands of people who every day think they're flying to New York City, only to arrive at the hellish purgatory that is LaGuardia.
- dejv 6y agoIt reminds me group of Slovak tourist that booked flights to Niš, Serbia instead of Nice, France as is pronounced a same. They really looked forward to nice beach vacation and were disappointed a bit.
- Ichthypresbyter 6y agoA friend of a friend worked in the tourist office at the airport in Rodez, France. Apparently a significant part of her job was dealing with British tourists who thought they had booked flights to the Greek island of Rhodes.
- sbierwagen 6y agoA coworker's story: Some clients are flying into Redmond for a meeting, and he's picking them up from the airport. They call. "We're here. Where are you?" "Well, I'm at the airport. Where are you?" "I told you, we're at the airport. How can you miss us? We're the only people here. This place is tiny!" They had flown into Redmond, Oregon, which has an attached municipal airport, instead of Seattle-Tacoma. The meeting is delayed while they arrange to fly to the correct state.
- jbluepolarbear 6y agoHow did that even happen? Did they not notice getting into the tiniest plane, possibly even a prop plane.
- djmips 6y agoData point: It's faster to get from Vancouver B.C. to Redmond on a prop plane (landing on Lake Washington) than going via Seatac...
- jbluepolarbear 6y agoOh I know, my great grandpa used to fly his plane onto lake Washington all the time.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoI have picked up people who wanted to go to Wake Forest University. It is located in the town of Winston-Salem, home of RJR Tobacco. There is also a town named Wake Forest, home to the original Wake Forest Baptist Manual Labor Institute, then Wake Forest College. Mr. R J Reynolds paid this college to move to his home town, donating the land, but not renaming it. If you try to go to Wake Forest, NC, you get RDU instead of GSO, and it is an extra 3 hours or so driving round trip.
- tsar_nikolai 6y agoThis reads word for word like the plot of an episode of the Simpsons. Homer the blissfully ignorant brewery worker takes the trip of his life but ends up at the wrong side of the continent from his intended destination where he becomes a local celebrity and gets coersed into all kinds of harmless adventures, like kissing the local seal. As his boss wants capitalize on his fame without giving him a raise, he retaliates by advertising their competitor on national television. He ends up back home, without a job, and with a recurring tax bill for a piece of land he has no intention of ever using. Nonetheless happier than ever. I love how life is often stranger than fiction.
- qw 6y agoI haven't seen that episode, but it sounds to me like they based the story on the actual events mentioned in the article
- cdaringe 6y agoI was once in Sofia, Bulgaria, trying to find the train to Bucharest. We asked not one, not two, but three people to confirm that we were on the correct train. They all confirmed it! ...kind of, correcting the pronunciation each time. Nope. Apparently there's some very similar sounding place in Bulgaria to my USA pronunciation of Bucharest I'd love to remember the name of the place.
- stevezsa8 6y agoI lived in South London (England) for many years. There is the famous 'Covent Garden Market' and a more industrial 'New Covent Garden Market' a few mile away. Occasionally I'd see very nicely dressed American tourists (imagine, a father in cargo shorts with a map in hand. And a wife and kids with brightly coloured tourist-clothes). All heading towards the industrial area. The first few times this happened, I actually pointed them to where I thought they wanted to go... the warehouses. I guess we all try to fit information as best as we can with the current context. So if someone says take me to down-town-San-Fransisco... and the last part seems like non-sense... we would often just point them to whatever downtown is nearby.
- Maursault 6y agoI know of a group of Penn State students that were meeting for Spring Break in Ocean City. Most went to MD, but at least one car-full went to NJ by mistake. A couple of decades ago I ran into a girlfriend that I used to see. I was working out of Pittsburgh, and I told her I was moving to Glendale, a neighborhood off the Parkway. She excitedly told me that she was also. But she was moving to California (and not the California in Pennsylvania).
- rapnie 6y agoThis reminds me of some funny anecdote about (mostly) American tourists on a visit to Amsterdam (dunno if they are true). Apparently with all the historical houses and them so crammed together in the city center with tight allies winding through them, some tourists get the impression that they are in a theme park. On ocassion, as the story goes, tourist would ask a resident to their astonishment: "Pardon me Madam, but could you tell me where the exit is?". Note that we have a couple such 'theme parks', like the Zaanse Schans [0] and Open Air Museum [1]. There are other places that really feel like theme parks to tourists, but are actually true residential areas where people live their daily lives. For instance Giethoorn [2] and Volendam [3]. Especially in Giethoorn this status is a mixed bag and residents - just like in Venice - aren't always that happy with huge influx of tourists. [0] https://www.dezaanseschans.nl/en/ https://www.dezaanseschans.nl/en/ [1] https://www.openluchtmuseum.nl/?taal=en https://www.openluchtmuseum.nl/?taal=en [2] https://giethoornvillage.com/ https://giethoornvillage.com/ [3] https://www.visit-volendam.com/ https://www.visit-volendam.com/
- mcv 6y agoA few years ago, there was a bit of a backlash against all the tourists treating the city as a theme park, so the city is trying to make it a bit less tourist-focused. At the same time, they're trying to share the tourism with the rest of the country by naming everything Amsterdam. Zandvoort is now "Amsterdam Beach", and I believe even Friesland has been called "Amsterdam Lake District" now, despite being on the other side of the country.
- rapnie 6y agoThe Dutch 'green heart' can be Central Park then :)
- ciabattabread 6y ago> "Amsterdam Lake District" Making London bankers feel at home?
- scandox 6y agoConnecting flights used to be quite a casual affair from what I can make out. My father fell asleep on a flight to Portugal in the 1970s and woke up halfway to Brazil. He then spent 3 months in Brazil just for the hell of it.
- kristopolous 6y agoBangor Maine actually looks charming and delightful. 3 days there sounds wonderful. If I wrote musicals, this would make the shortlist.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoIf "charming and delightful" is your goal go to Portland. That's the tourist city that has all the tourism economy stuff to cater to tourists. Bangor is basically a giant service plaza for everything that's further north and west than your typical Masshole with three kids and spouse piled into the Land Rover is willing to drive. There's some dive bars, college bars and museums. Don't get me wrong, it's a great place but it's neither the "high culture city" nor the "charming rural backwater" that most of HN is looking to visit.
- dubeye 6y agoWhen I was a fresh 19 year old backpacker, pre mobile internet, browsing the departures board at Bangkok airport, I hopped on a flight to Hong Kong, because I thought it was in Japan. Took me a day to work it out!
- stevula 6y agoA friend of mine arrived in the Bay Area from India years ago. As a gay man he wanted to visit the Castro in San Francisco so he hopped on the BART train and went to a stop called Castro (Valley). I think he walked around for a bit wondering what all the fuss was about (Castro Valley is not particularly gay, or interesting at all for that matter).
- rodh 6y agoI noticed London there's a sign at the exit of the suburban "Abbey Road" station in London, directing tourists (who were presumably looking for an iconic pedestrian crossing photo opportunity) back towards London. I wonder how many of these suburban neighbourhoods exist, with unexpected tourism due to transit stations sharing a name with a local landmark.
- teekert 6y agoAnecdote: A colleague of mine left a plane on the French Island Corsica. She got into a conversation with a man telling her he and his wife looked forward to their holiday in Costa Rica. Boy were they in for a surprise.
- arethuza 6y agoI lived and worked in the centre of Edinburgh for a long time so have quite a few confused tourist stories but the oddest was someone who jumped from their hire car and asked through sign language whether Dean Bridge (which they had just crossed) was the bridge marked on his map as the Forth Road Bridge. For anyone who doesn't know the area those two bridges are rather different in pretty much every respect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Road_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Road_Bridge
- anotherhue 6y agoThis was recently covered on the excellent (and my personal favourite) podcast Futility Closet https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/01/11/podcast-episode-327-the-misplaced-tourist/ https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/01/11/podcast-episode-32... It seems to predate the linked article by about a month.
- Leherenn 6y agoI once booked a return ticket which did not go back to the same airport (though it was the same city, 2 hours of public transport appart). I was pretty confused while waiting at the gate when they announced the "wrong" airport, took me a while to realise I was not at the wrong gate and that it was actually my flight.
- bananapear 6y agoThe frequent appearance of lost Beatles fans at Abbey Road station in East London necessitated the addition of this sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Road_DLR_station#/media/File:Abbey_Road_DLR_Station_Beatles_Sign.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Road_DLR_station#/media/...
- Leszek 6y agoThere's a certain sweet irony to this article saying that Erwin Kreuz was from a village near "Augsberg" in Bavaria; if one indeed were to try to go to "Augsberg, Bavaria", they would find themselves in a) a real but tiny place, and b) quite far away from Augsburg, Bavaria, where Kreuz was _actually_ from.
- zaarn 6y agoI noticed this quite amusing typo as well, mostly because I live in the Augsburg Area (During tertiary school, I had a few friends in Bonstetten, the little village that Erwin Kreuz lived in during the events of the article).
- wazoox 6y agoClassic problem in Paris: you constantly find (well, out of Covid...) baffled travellers (mostly Asian) lost with their suitcases at the Charles-de-Gaulle-Étoile subway station. They're looking for the Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, 50 km away... Unfortunately the RER (suburban train) station names aren't distinct enough.
- cafard 6y agoHah. Pennsylvania has Indiana State and California State universities. The Missouri portion of the Ozarks has some towns named after states. At a family reunion, a cousin suggested we drive to Nevada, telling me it was another state she hadn't been to. I explained.
- williesleg 6y agoI can see why. One is full of shit, the other one covered in shit.
- jb1991 6y agoIt's nice to read an article that actually summarizes the entire story first, at the top, in a few short and enjoyable paragraphs, before getting into the depth of the story. So many articles today don't do this and to sit down and read one feels like the commitment of starting a novel. You have no idea where the story is going and the writer has put themselves on a pedestal, probably wishing they were writing a novel instead. The sentences and paragraphs begin with a lot of atmosphere and little actual narrative. Journalism is not regular prose, and I wish more journalists would do what is being done in this piece, something that used to be a lot more common in the industry.
- S53Vflnr4n 6y agoA new to the country colleague of mine in Overland Park, Kansas thought First Watch was a security service until I took him for breakfast there.
- zelienople 6y agoWenn ich auch nur in die Nähe von Berlin kommen sollte, werd' ich verhaftet.
- spcebar 6y agoI had travel plans to visit a friend in Wisconsin in I believe 2018. My flight left at around 5:30am so I was a bit groggy when I got to the airport. I went to the counter to check-in and get my ticket, and couldn't remember where my connection was, so I told the woman at the counter my name and that I was flying to either Chicago or Detroit. She said "you're flying to Detroit, and your plane isn't leaving at 5:30, it's leaving at 5" (which was 10 minutes from now). I hauled ass to the security line and told a TSA agent that I was about to miss my plane. They hustled me to the front of the line, I took my belt and my shoes off and threw the contents of my pockets into a bin. I went through the body scanner, and ran to the gate, which, thankfully was within site of security. With my belt and shoes still in hand, I gave my ticket to the gate agent, who told me, you're in luck, they're right about to close the doors. So I got on the plane, and, unrelated to the story, met a fellow who introduced me to AWK and Hacker News. In the last 10 minutes, I took out my phone to see what gate my connection would be at, and saw that it would not be in Detroit, but in Chicago. The woman at the check-in desk had given me a ticket to the wrong flight. I told a flight attendant, "I'm on the wrong flight," and she said "what do you mean you're on the wrong flight?" I explained the situation, and she told me to speak to the gate agent when I got off the plane, and that they would sort it out. I got off the plane and started explaining the situation to the gate agent, and as he was trying to figure it out, a flight attendant came off the plane and said to him, "you better be giving this guy free miles, and free upgrades, and free drinks." They put me on a connecting flight from Detroit to Wisconsin and I got in a few hours early. All in all, an interesting experience and a fun story. They didn't give me and free miles or drinks though. To this day I have no idea how I got on that plane--whether it was a colossal blunder by the gate agent or, if, perhaps, by some coincidence, another person by my name (which is a fairly common name) was supposed to be traveling to Detroit from that airport that day and missed their flight.
- usr1106 6y agoNever heard about about that airline, although I flew from Germany to the US more than once only few years later. I would also have claimed that no way there was a direct flight from Frankfurt to Bangor. However the airline existed and served Frankfurt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Airways https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Airways So probably even the weird connection existed. The Spiegel article from 1977 is online, if you want to read it in German https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40736384.html https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40736384.html