If we look at the pages of some old atlases or travel notes, we'll see, in addition to the actual descriptions of travel, also a 'selection of facts' about distant countries, where you can definitely meet, for example, people with dog heads, one-eyed cyclops or completely bizarre animals, the degree of whimsicality of which depends only on the author’s imagination.
Today, many centuries ago, we have everything to have comprehensive info about almost any country. Google Maps, Wikipedia, numerous videos and books - sources for every taste. And yet, sometimes tourists give out completely wild phrases or questions about the countries they are traveling to, practically admitting their ignorance. And threads like this one in the AskReddit community collect these stories for us.
More info: Reddit
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In fact, people quite often aren't very interested in the world around them - more precisely, the world outside their own town or country. In this case, travel really comes to the rescue - after all, Mark Twain wrote a century and a half ago: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.” Today, travel is accessible to many people (compared to the 19th century, of course) - so people willingly share their prejudices and fanaticism with others...
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It is always human nature not only to expand our horizons, but also to adjust the world around us to it, using the so-called 'availability heuristic' - that is, if we know some fact - about a person, animal, country or phenomenon, then we will unconsciously use it almost every time we encounter something like this.
An excellent example is a Canadian friend of mine who, having lived in Ukraine for almost ten years, sincerely believed that a resort village called Sanzheika on the Black Sea was actually pronounced San-Jacob. Simply because this kind of sound was much more familiar to his ear.
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The availability heuristic sometimes does whatever it wants to us. We may have, for example, read a book or watched an adventure film about the travels of heroes through different countries in the old days - and these clichés are firmly deposited in our heads. And then, when fate brings us to this country, the subconscious 'shoots out' a half-forgotten fact, forcing us to do an instant facepalm. Well, or the people around us do it, in case we're entitled enough not to notice our own gaffe.
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Be that as it may, tourism and travel have always been, are and will be - which means that people with prejudices will continue to roam around the globe and sometimes confuse local natives with their unexpected judgments and wordings. And we'll read these stories, crack up at them and, perhaps, share our own narratives too. For example, why not in the comments to this post, huh?
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There were a couple of tourists who decided that it would be a good idea to stand directly in the path of the Queen's guard to take a selfie with them. Those guys don't stop for anyone, they will walk through you if they have to. I've seen so many videos of it happening online but I never thought I'd get to see it with my own eyes. Man, the look on their faces when they got yelled at to move out the way... it was like a weird mixture of terror and offence. Like they completely expected them to stop and pose or something. It always baffles me that people seem to forget that they are actual soldiers and not just some guys playing dress up for the sake of tourists.In Thailand, berating locals for eating Italian food because Thai food is "so tasty".
B***h, Thai people eat Thai food every day. Going out for Italian is like you going out for Thai food in your home country.It wasn't about the country exactly but I was working in a hotel reception in a Mexican beach and an American women told me that the water of the sea was very hot, if I could do something, I thought OK maybe I didn't understand correctly can you speak slower and she repeat the same question.
Of course I did a Mayan dance and the water was colder afterwards.Holy s**t I live in Hawaii and one time a tourist asked about turning the waterfalls off to clean them.
I wish I was making this up.“We’re here for a week, so we thought we’d drive out to the Grand Canyon, stop in Vegas, and then see the Golden Gate Bridge.”
They landed on the east coast.Had a dude come up here to Canada. We are talking business and what not then he says “too bad you guys are completely communist now.” Like dude, I don’t think you even know what that means.This is coming from the other side, but I'm from the US and had someone come back from a trip to Italy saying "Italians are stupid. I don't know what's wrong with them, but they don't know how to talk"
The way she said it made me think she didn't even know that other languages exist, and so many Italians speak English my first thought was that nobody wanted to talk to her rather than no one spoke English."Everyone here speaks such good English!" *In London*.
Also – I've been asked repeatedly what my plans for thanksgiving are.“If it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking German” -Some stupid yank, in Germany.Heard an american couple behind me be completely outraged that the italian restaurant we were in would not accept them to pay in dollars.
"Wait ... you don't take ... AMERICAN dollars???" with a huge emphasis on "american". It was pretty funny how dumb those people were.Was asked if we had electricity.
Was told we don't have central heating in our houses.
Was told 'i just love your queen'.
I'm Irish."I've been here three days and I haven't heard the British accent yet"
Yeah... That's because you've heard *several.* We are a multitude of accents and dialects, like every other country. There is no *one* 'British accent' ?.I've heard multiple tourists plan to take "day trips" to places in the US that are on the other side of the country.
I also watched some Asian tourists try and get a selfie with a black man, who was just trying to ride the subway in peace. He looked so uncomfortable.“So, I’ll be able to make it to New York in a few hours from here.”
Ma’am. You are in Southern California. You’re talking about driving to New York. That is the complete opposite side of the country, and it is a long way from here. You have no concept of the scale of this country. You’re gonna be really upset when it takes you a good six hours to get across Riverside County, let alone the other five days, maybe six or seven, to drive to New York.
No, you cannot get to New York in a few hours without flying.When I was bartending in college I had an American woman insist Iceland was so safe because everyone was carrying a gun at all times, like she didn't just say it once, she kept contradicting and arguing with me after I told her Iceland has insanely strict gun laws compared to the USA and definitely does not allow everyone to open/conceal carry.Am Australian asked me when the igloos would go up and did we have move our work and school into them every year? while in Vancouver, BC, a location in Canada with similar weather to Seattle. Edit: she was very serious, she was a young teen from a small town, visiting on a school trip. Aside from whatever airport she left from, Vancouver was one of her first visits to a city.
Bonus: An American asked me, while I was in the States, if I was impressed by the bridges. I was not in a place with any famous bridges, I was in Idaho, so I asked him why he asked. Because Canada doesn't have any, he replied, in a This Is So Obvious Voice. Baffled, I prodded him to continue. He believed that because Canada was frozen, everyone just drove over the perpetually frozen rivers. .When my British friend said he didn’t want to visit me in Seattle unless he also had time to visit New York. Had to explain to him that’s like saying you can’t visit Dublin if you can’t also make time for Istanbul.I was talking to a lady in a bar in NYC once and told her I grew up in Malaysia and she genuinely asked me "Do you guys use money there or trade stuff?".Both of these overheard in a souvenir shop in Amsterdam:
Cashier: That'll be 30 euros, please.
American tourist: What's that in real money?
(Different) American tourist: What do you mean you don't accept dollars?
And not really something anyone has said, but still worth mentioning; apparently some Americans don't realize they can't just take their firearms with them to Europe. I love this part of England. While in a store in Edinburgh. Edinburgh the Scottish capital.An American couple on holiday in the same hotel as my mum told her they'd visited England and seen the Eifel tower.
She told them that was in France, and they condescending said "no ma'am, its in London."
She agreed it must be and walked off.That Norway is the capitol of Sweden.Where do you keep the vikings?
An American tourist visiting Denmark… left him very confused and a little dissapointed by telling him the truth about Vikings and that we did in fact not have resevations or anything.Just yesterday: "I don't want to follow Italy's traffic laws. What's the best way to get away with driving a vehicle I'm not licenced to drive?"
More funny than offensive:
"Where's the Parthenon?"
About 800 miles that way.I overheard an American woman saying that she was surprised at how well us Australians spoke American, although the accent made it a little hard to understand.I once heard a US tourist speaking to someone back home about how London was okay but things were kind of old-looking.« it doesn't look anything like Emily in Paris ». Yeah no s**t.I was up in Edinburgh visiting a friend who was studying for her masters degree there. We decided to do some touristy stuff, and went to the castle and did one of the guided tours. In our group were two middle-aged American women (I think they said they were from Tennessee).
From Edinburgh Castle, you can see quite far, over the Firth of Forth, an estuary, and beyond the river. One the women pointed to this and asked the guide, "Hey, is that Ireland?"
She thought the Firth of Forth was the Irish Sea, despite clearly not being a sea, there being a bridge spanning it, her being on the opposite coast, and facing the wrong direction, and the other bank of the estuary was the Republic of Ireland. I understand maybe not being completely clued up on the geography of a foreign country, but, to that extent, it was almost impressive.
The tour guide let the question hang for a few seconds before letting out an exasperated, "No".Foreigners coming to India and speaking Hindi in non Hindi states. Half of India doesn't speak Hindi.I was the tourist. I was told by many concerned coworkers and friends that I shouldn't travel alone as a woman to dangerous Eastern Europe because I was going to get trafficked or Hostel'd.
The dangerous Eastern European country with criminals waiting behind every corner to snatch away Spanish women?
Slovenia...Someone compared Canadian money to Monopoly money and then asked if we had Monopoly in Canada.The capital of malaysia is singapore.An American on tour in Italy asked me why we Australians didn’t all know each other.
Another American asked me do I know what a back yard is and do we have them in Australia?When a friend from Germany came to visit me in Turkey the first thing he asked the people here was if we also spoke Arabic and why most women don’t wear the hijab.An American in Australia who asked "do you guys have the same moon down here?"
Edit: more responses here than I expected so just to give a bit more info. A British friend of mine living in Australia was asked this by a visiting American over twenty years ago. If it was to me I would have asked, what exactly do you mean? I've only been to the Northern Hemisphere once and can't recall looking at the moon. The explanations given now make perfect sense. Cheers.
