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.
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 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.
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) :-)
Ha!
I've got a friend who, on his very early 20s, wanted to stay for a while in Ireland to learn English while working (Madrid, Spain, here). He had a big farewell party, drank a bit too much, and missed his flight early in the morning, only to find that he had booked a flight to BERLIN instead of DUBLIN.
He was so lucky to miss it, imagine that hangover-y arrival to Berlin imagining it's Ireland.
I'd imagine it has something to do with the phenomenon wehre you can raed the wrdos in a sntecnee eevn if tehy are jmlbued up. Plus being drunk would magnify the chance to mistake BERLIN for DUBLIN. The last halves of the words arethe same, and so do B and D as well as B and R if you squint.
shrugs In Spanish the accent for both Berlin and Dublin is in the last silabe, so it sounds a bit more similar than in English. This plus being naive, young and careless, I suppose... :D
I once called a travel agent to book a flight to San Jose (California). She mis-heard me as wanting to go to Santa Fe (New Mexico). She called me a few days later in a panic, saying "Sorry, I accidentally booked you a flight to San Jose. I'll cancel it and re-book it". Two wrongs do make a right.
Gimpo'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.
I'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.
CX 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.
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.
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.
A 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...
At one point there was an ISO standard for Australian state and territory abbreviations that used two digits. According to that standard, NSW was NS. Unfortunately, since ISO charges six arms and three legs for a standard, businesses can sometimes run on stupid standards that are decades out of date.
My mother saw her return ticket was heading to Melbourne VI and assumed it meant gate 6 at Melbourne airport. It didn't. Fortunately there's no real significance to the return gate at Melbourne airport for an international flight, so it didn't affect me picking her up.
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)
> 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.
There's a similar effect with the initials D R, M R or M S.
In Britain, including a dot after abbreviations is a bit dated — it's UK, USA, NASA, JG Smith Motors Ltd, Mr Jones etc. (American usage seems mixed; I sometimes see "USA" and "U.K." in the same sentence.)
That means "Dr Jones", "DR JONES" and "D R JONES" are particularly easy to confuse.
Canadian provinces and territories also use standard 2 letter abbreviations, which makes things work better with the US postal and addressing system. BC, AB, SK, MB, ON, QC, etc.
We had a chat about that on HN just the other day. It's cheaper to hack something together based on the world around you than it is to pay ISO a bucket of money to read one standard.
If you check the link you linked, you'll see that until 2004 the codes were indeed NS for NSW, VI for Vic, TS for Tas and QL for Qld. If you bought the standard for an arm and a leg in 2003, why would you buy the update for two arms and three legs in 2004? It's not like there's been any new states in Australia ever.
Interesting. I only first used these ISO labels around 2011, so the two letter versions for Australia never hit me. However, having grown up in NSW, i can attest that it’s never been a two letter abbreviation in common language. Likely the standard was mass produced and “corrected” for ambiguity later, that’s my guess anyway.
There’s like a daily flamewar on avherald. They even have a faq entry for this:
Q: Why do you use "wrong" abbreviations (e.g. for New South Wales)?
We use the original ISO 3166 standard (two letter code) to remain compatible with other sources. Therefore the abbreviation for e.g. New South Wales is NS unlike the postal abbreviation NSW.
New 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.
It is for this reason New Mexico license plates have “New Mexico, USA” on them. For those not aware, every state simply puts the name of the state on their license plate but New Mexico adds ‘USA’ to theirs. The only state that I believe does this.
I believe they started that in the late 1960's. Not all of the plates have USA on them. The standard yellow plates do, but the alternate "centennial" plates don't. Also, some of the specialty plates do and some don't.
In a rather unfortunate coincidence, Ohio started issuing yellow plates with red text to people with too many DUI convictions a decade or so back. You don't often see plates from NM in OH, but when you do, it's a bit confusing.
Not only that, but such a thing is probably illegal in the USA [0]. Someone needs to take it all the way through to the SCOTUS, although being forced to wear a scarlet letter as a form of public shaming has been ruled on before, if I understand correctly.
FWIW I can’t recall seeing one of these plates in 10+ years.
I have seen them before, though. Part of my family is a little, uh, rough, and when someone would get these in the past we’d say “oh so and so got their party tags”.
So I’ve always remembered them as party tags... lol.
Was looking through the comments and saw this. Glad I'm not alone in remembering these. We called them "party tags" instead of "party plates", though. I wonder how many people remember that being a thing in Ohio.
The column is called "One of Our Fifty is Missing." People report trying to fly from Florida to NM and being told they need a passport and have to talk to a supervisor with a map before they can get home, etc.
John Preston: Just recently, my auto insurance was canceled when I gave them notice that I was moving back to New Mexico. After inquiring why, they replied, “We don’t cover Mexico.”
Not 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.
A colleague's husband had his credit card blocked by his English bank when he travelled from England to Northern Ireland.
He was hiking in an area with limited phone signal, so he phoned his wife (it was a joint account) and she tried to unblock it. The call centre employee said it was because of unexpected foreign travel.
It's easy to believe the call centre person is ignorant.
It's not so clear why the anti-fraud department of one of Britain's largest banks should think the same.
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!
It 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.
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.
Not 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.
The 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.
Philadelphia 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.
I 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 :-)
The 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.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of a bus line in Daejeon that had these three consecutive stops:
West Daejeon Intersection Station (seo-daejeon-negeori-yeok)
West Daejeon Intersection (seo-daejeon-negeori)
West Daejeon Station Intersection (seo-daejeon-yeok-negeori)
...at least they should be within walking distance.
Reminds 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.
I 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)
I 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.
It'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.
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.
While 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.
The problem is so acute because these two countries’ own names for themselves are even more similar than in English: Slovensko (Slovakia) and Slovenija (Slovenia).
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.
My 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!
As a German, I only know Staples from American TV shows and movies. Is there Staples IN Germany? And yes, I live in a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants.
I wonder if any Germans, thinking "surely this town has decent public transportation", wander into a Subway sandwich shop thinking it is an underground train.
There 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.
I live in London Ontario, right by the Thames. Got hassled at customs in Netherlands being asked why my Canadian passport was issued from England. People always say they can't hear the accent when I say I'm from London (besides that time at customs they were accusing my lisp of sounding a bit English)
And Ontario, CA has a bottled water provider called Niagara[0]. Not to be confused with Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada. When I saw a bottle of Niagra water in California (as I'm from Ontario) I was unbelievably confused.
It's a pretty lengthy page and is unlikely to be exhaustive. It can be a bit of a minefield though. For example, that page lists Boston Georgia, but according to the top of this page:
You laugh, but I had an interview with some airforce people for some scholarship money. Living in Paris France they scheduled me for a phone interview with someone in Paris Texas. Needless to say we missed each other with the timezone difference.
On 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".
SFO 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”.
There'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.
I 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).
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.
I 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.
I 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!
Back 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.
I 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.
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.
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. :-)
There 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.
It 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.
I 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.
At 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.)
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, 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.
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.
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.
The 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.
Last 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.
If you are only going to visit one location, or if you have young kids, or you want to hit up the other smithsonian museum's the Air and Space museum on the mall takes priority.
That said, I've been to the Air and Space museum a handful of times, and I only go back when I have visitors in town who want to do the tourist thing.
The udvar-hazy faculty is something I'll visit on my own over and over again. It's an incredible collection of important machines including the discovery space shuttle, an SR71 blackbird, the Enola Gay, etc.
Two 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.
The museum in DC hits all the famous stuff, Wright Flyer, Bell X1, etc.
The museum at Dulles features a lot of much larger aircraft and a lot of the more niche technical displays that they can't justify the space for in DC.
In 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.
It'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.
"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
There'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
Don’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.
I did the same mistake and only figured it out when checking in because there was a fee for checked luggage; there's no fee only for international flights, only for US/Canada flights.
I'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...
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.
It'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.
Portland 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.
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).
I 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.
In 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.
More 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).
This 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 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.
This 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.
In 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).
Connecting 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.
Even 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.
Had 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.
To 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.
A 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,
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.
I 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:
When 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!
A 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.
The 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.
Classic 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.
Never 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.
It 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.
A 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.
The 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.
I 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).
I 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 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.
If "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.
Hah. 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.
Anecdote: 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.
I 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Also, 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.
Speaking 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
Clueless 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.
Kind 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.
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
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/italian-tourists-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/31/teen-accidenta...
Wikipedia Link:
Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney,_Nova_Scotia
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney