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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

#181

Post by flemhans »

marcandre wrote: post #96
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…

I 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!

I'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.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#183

Post by Cthulhu_ »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #118
zwayhowder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time.

I mean if we ever get more than 17576 airports in the world, there will be a problem with the three-letter airport codes because every system built in the past 50 years will be using that.

Fixing, replacing or modernizing something like that becomes a feat of archeology. I mean the codebase I work in is from 2012 and it's already got a high rate of wtf/sec (the incompetence of my predecessor didn't help there)

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#186

Post by scirocco »

fishywang wrote: post #84
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…

My 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…

Three years ago I booked a flight to San Juan (SJU), Puerto Rico by mistake. I was supposed to go to San Jose (SJO) in Costa Rica.

I will never forget the moment I read "SJO" in the email realizing I should have booked a flight to "SJU". Then going into Google, and typing SJO to find out where I was actually flying. I was prepared for it to be in Asia, Africa or anywhere. Luckily, Puerto Rico was just a small detour to Costa Rica (flew from Europe) :-)

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#187

Post by mcv »

rapnie wrote: post #180

This 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, bu…

A 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.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#188

Post by stevula »

A 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).

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#189

Post by mcv »

wil421 wrote: post #63
w-m wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

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.

The kind of beer also matters. I was never much of a beer drinker, but during my university days, there was one beer that I really liked: Het Kanon, a heavy beer with 11.6% alcohol, sold in .45l bottles. That is really not comparable to drinking a regular beer.

Later they reduced the bottle size to the more common 0.33l. Probably for safety reasons.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#190

Post by orthoxerox »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #183
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.

Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time. I mean if we ever get more than 17576 airports in the world, there will be a problem with the three-letter airport codes because every system built in the past 50 years will be using that. Fixing, replacing…

> Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time.

There was a story by a man named Amr whose name could never survive a trip through airline booking systems that encode the gender in the given name field: "SMITH/JOHNMR". His name would always come back as A.

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...

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