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I 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
by RegnisGnaw 6y ago
I 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.
- JacobDotVI 6y agoAnd St. John’s Antigua
- rriepe 6y agoIt's also one of Florida's most famous rivers, with the surrounding area going by the name.
- mxcrossr 6y agoImagine dressing for the Virgin Islands and ending up in Labrador
- mikewarot 6y agoSt John, Indiana is about 35 miles SSE of Chicago.
- theluketaylor 6y agoI personally know several people who have made that exact mistake, ending up in not just the wrong city but the wrong province by travelling to St John's when they meant to go to Saint John or vice versa.
- smnrchrds 6y agoIt's so easy to mix them up! Two cities, both in eastern Canada, in the only two provinces whose names start with New. To make it worse, both names translate to Saint-Jean in French. Iran has ~300 cities, town, and villages named Mohammadabad. Add Aliabad, Hasanabad, Hoseynabad, and Dehnow to the mix, and I don't know how people can find anywhere on the map. https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/longest-disambiguation-pages-on-wikipedia-an-investigation.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/longest-disambiguation-...
- klyrs 6y agoI attended a conference in St John's. Two of our plenary speakers ended up in New Brunswick. One missed their slot, the other was scheduled for day 2. This is a familiar problem, and the organizers PLASTERED the website with reminders to avoid NB. I'm told that the second s in St John's stands for screech. (or, I just came up with that mnemonic on the spot. we may never know)
- heresie-dabord 6y agoMnemonic: Newfoundland and Labrador = 2 entities => Saint John's New Brunswick = 1 entity => Saint John
- reaperducer 6y agoNew Mexico Magazine has a column every month where people tell their tales of people thinking that the U.S. state of New Mexico is in the nation of Mexico. Things like insurance and credit card companies cancelling their accounts because they moved out of the country. Apparently it happens all the time.
- fakedang 6y agoWait, so insurance and CC companies are the ones making the mistake?
- leephillips 6y agoNot too surprising. When I worked at the US Naval Research Laboratory someone submitted the paperwork for travel orders to attend a physics meeting in New Mexico, and it came back refused because he didn’t allow the required lead time for approval of foreign travel.
- selimthegrim 6y agoDo they think foreign countries have a ZIP+4 AND a +1 country code?
- reaperducer 6y agoIf they can't remember the names of 50 states, I wouldn't expect them to understand ZIP Codes.
- rpeden 6y agoAnd +1 covers at least one foreign country.
- selimthegrim 6y agoCanada doesn't use ZIP+4. Whatever, Breaking Bad should have put this problem to bed.
- zikzak 6y agoGrew up there and never heard of this! Hilarious! :)
- craz8 6y agoI’ve been down this route on a fairly large flight booking site a few years ago. The default result for Sydney was the Nova Scotia one Took me a few seconds to realize the error
- Clewza313 6y agoExtra bonus fun: Concur, everybody's favorite corporate flight booking engine, shows both Sydney, Nova Scotia and Sydney, New South Wales as "Sydney, NS" in the destination selection dropdown.
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoNo way, that's really dumb. New South Wales is always NSW to me.
- zwayhowder 6y agoCan concur, I live in Sydney, NSW and have made the mistake in concur myself. Fortunately just for listing the city I had a meal in, not for booking a flight.
- RegnisGnaw 6y agoI wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.
- zwayhowder 6y agoA lot of smaller platforms I've worked with, before address validation became a standard library to pull in, would have a two character field for state if they were developed in the USA. Most things developed outside the USA tend to put no limit on it. For Concur I think it was built on top of the limitations of the global platforms most airlines use that were designed a long time ago for mainframes that didn't have a lot of memory. (There was something about dates once...). Working on platforms built for industries that relied so heavily on mainframes reminds me of the apocryphal story that the space shuttle was the size it was because it parts had to travel on railways that were built to a standard size that matched horse drawn wagons which were built to a standard size for two horses abreast. Or to summarise, the size of the space shuttle was determined by two horses arses...
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
- fishywang 6y agoMy favorite similar pair is Yinchuan (a city in western China) vs. Incheon (a satellite city of Seoul and where their bigger airport is). They sound very similar in Chinese, and in China people usually refer to Incheon airport as "the Seoul airport" (a lot of average Chinese people probably don't even know Seoul has another airport), and to make things worse, the IATA airport codes for the two are INC vs. ICN. So the urban legend is that for a lot of Koreans living in Beijing, when they are planning to go back to Korea, they go to a travel agent on the street (this was around 2000 so online booking were not ubiquitous) using their not so fluent Chinese to say "I need a flight ticket to Incheon", the agent will often book them to Yinchuan instead. Korean Air had a direct flight between Yinchuan and Incheon for a while (they probably still have that flight) and the urban legend is that flight is mainly for those confused travellers.
- culturestate 6y ago> a lot of average Chinese people probably don't even know Seoul has another airport I'd guess most people who haven't traveled domestically in Korea don't know this, full stop.
- jhugo 6y agoGimpo's fairly big for business travel among the big East Asian cities too - Tokyo, Osaka, Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing (and maybe some others?) all have direct flights. In most cases those flights are to the more convenient "city" airport in those cities too.
- culturestate 6y agoI've been flying in and out of Seoul for years from Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc and I've never once been offered a flight to Gimpo. Could be an artifact of always flying the same airlines (mostly CX/SQ) though.
- jhugo 6y agoCX might have used to have a flight to Gimpo, but not now, and SQ doesn’t. I’ve flown there internationally on JAL, China Southern, Shanghai Airlines, and China Airlines, maybe some others. I did notice that corp travel agents sometimes only search Incheon and need to be reminded that Gimpo exists.
- marcandre 6y agoI was flying to Costa Rica from Montreal. Airline wanted money for checked luggage, but typically for long distance flights like this it's free. After enquiring, turns out I had bought the wrong flight to San Jose, California, instead of San Jose, Costa Rica. It's SJC vs SJO too, easy to confuse... Glad I figured that out before getting there!
- dtparr 6y agoReally puts the Dione Warwick song into a new light. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Know_the_Way_to_San_Jose https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Know_the_Way_to_San_J...
- klipt 6y agoSan Jose, California has a nice technology museum, and a short commute to many silicon valley companies, but not much else going for it!
- yumraj 6y agoYou do realize that San Jose is the biggest city in the Silicon Valley and there are tons of well known companies in San Jose.. :)
- tguvot 6y agoIt goes both ways. Once I was booking trip to San Jose. Flight was surprisingly expensive (but who cares, season variations and such. anyway it's work trip) but what gave me a pause, it's that cars were dirt cheep compared to usual. After poking around, turned out that I was booking trip to San Jose, Costa Rica instead of San Jose, California.
- flemhans 6y agoI've made this "mistake". It was just a layover, so it didn't matter much. But suddenly realizing we were going to Costa Rica and not CA was still fun.
- mwcampbell 6y agoReminds me of a minor subplot in a musical (very obscure, you probably haven't heard of it) that I was in as a teenager. Throughout the show, from time to time, the main characters (all high-schoolers) talk about an upcoming band trip to Peru. It's assumed that the trip will be to the country in South America. Then at the end, as part of a closing announcement, the vice principal of the school (the character I played) reveals that the trip is to Peru, Wisconsin.
- xtracto 6y agoSeveral years ago I lived in La Paz, BCS, Mexico. A friend of mine worked in the Mail service in that city and told me they received A LOT of mail that was meant to be sent to La Paz, Bolivia.
- Ichthypresbyter 6y agoApparently in several cities the staff of the Slovakian and Slovenian embassies meet regularly to exchange wrongly addressed mail.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoThe problem is so acute because these two countries’ own names for themselves are even more similar than in English: Slovensko (Slovakia) and Slovenija (Slovenia).
- Symbiote 6y agoNowadays, several smaller European countries recommend prefixing the postcode with the ISO country code: Kúpeľná 1/A SK-811 02 Bratislava 1 Slovakia Pošta Slovenije d.o.o. SI-2500 MARIBOR Slovenia In fact, I see it's a general recommendation for international post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes#On_the_use_of_country_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes#On_the_us...
- usr1106 6y agoWhile others like the German post does recommend not use abbreviations, but full country names. As this discussion showed, there are plenty of possibilities to get abbreviations confused.
- yongjik 6y agoNot as impressive, but there used to be two stations in Seoul's circular subway line 2, named Sinchon and Sincheon, on the opposite corner of Seoul. In older Romanization scheme it was worse: Shinch'on vs. Shinch'ŏn. (I guess it didn't help that they sound almost identical to an untrained English speaker.) Sadly (for me), they renamed one station, so they aren't confusing any more. Boo.
- smcl 6y agoI had this issue meeting up with a friend when I was visiting Tokyo, turns out Akebanebashi and Akebonobashi are similar sounding metro station names and can lead to a lot of confusion :-)
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThe NYC subway frequently has multiple stops with the same name, e.g. “23 St” (at Lexington Av, Broadway, 6 Av and 8th Av). That’s not always a big problem in Manhattan, because they’re relatively close. But it gets more interesting when you try to get to DeKalb (L) towards the extreme north end of Brooklyn, while DeKalb (BQR) in downtown Brooklyn is the one people know.
- madcaptenor 6y agoPhiladelphia only has two subway lines but still has this problem because they run roughly parallel, about a mile and a half apart, for a bit. As a result both lines have stops called "Spring Garden" and "Girard" named after streets that intersect both lines.
- rkuykendall-com 6y ago"Newark Penn Station" comes one stop before "New York Penn Station" on the train from Newark Airport, a common port for visitors.
- nonfamous 6y agoThe Chicago “El” subway system has three stations named “Chicago”. None are in the downtown core. I always wonder about tourists hopping on the Blue line at O’Hare and where they end up.
- mikepurvis 6y agoThere's a small Sidney on Vancouver Island also: http://vancouverisland.com/plan-your-trip/regions-and-towns/vancouver-island-bc-islands/sidney/ http://vancouverisland.com/plan-your-trip/regions-and-towns/... I actually spent some time in Sydney NSW some years ago, and stopped off in Victoria, BC to visit friends on the way there; it was kind of funny having to clarify where it was I was going because in that context they definitely assumed I was on the way to their local Sidney, population 11k, not the one on the other side of the Pacific.
- pif 6y agoThey bought the wrong ticket, it can happen, I get it. But they are going to literally the other side of the planet and never had a look to their tickets? Never wondered why Canada is suddenly between Europe and Australia? Not the smallest hint from the fact that they were not going to fly for longer than 10 hours? Edit: even better: from Argentina to Australia... via Canada???