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A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

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Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#111

Post by xtracto »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #4

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 (B…

Several 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.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#112

Post by rconti »

mikewarot wrote: post #55
sanj wrote: post #23

I 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.

My 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.

$75! It cost me $150 to get a taxi from SFO to Menlo Park once! (20-25mins)

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#113

Post by mkl »

khazhoux wrote: post #53
mkl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

Clearly, 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.

No 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".

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#114

Post by mxcrossr »

CydeWeys wrote: post #32
smnrchrds wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saint John, New Brunswick and St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador must confuse people too. I never remember which one is which without Googling it.

There's also a St John, Virgin Islands.

Imagine dressing for the Virgin Islands and ending up in Labrador

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#115

Post by zwayhowder »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #70
Clewza313 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extra 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.

No way, that's really dumb. New South Wales is always NSW to me.

Can 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.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#116

Post by rconti »

jonas21 wrote: post #72
wil421 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 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.

I dunno... 17 is kind of an odd number to say in response to a question (unless he always drank exactly 17 beers a day, which would seem equally odd). But 17 x 12oz = 204 oz = 6033 ml, which is almost exactly 12 x 0.5 liter beers. Which seems more like the sort of thing you'd say, i.e. Q: "How many beers do you drink a day?" A: "About a dozen"

Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking maybe 17 * 0.33, but that's an equally-confusing 5.6L

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#117

Post by schoen »

w-m wrote: post #20
ilamont wrote: post #3

There 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-tr...

In 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-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 littl…

It 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. :-)

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#118

Post by RegnisGnaw »

zwayhowder wrote: post #115
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way, that's really dumb. New South Wales is always NSW to me.

Can 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.

I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#120

Post by ghaff »

I 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.
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