Re: Introducing the city

Ric Locke <warlocke@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[Dan]

> > And then there are the people who give directions according to *former*
> > landmarks: "You head straight on until you get to the corner where they
> > tore down the brewery four years ago, and then you turn left and go along to
> > just past where the Olsens lived until they lost everything on Black Friday
> > and had to sell out, and you take the dirt road on your right to where the
> > old duck pond dried up, and it's right on the other side of the field that
> > the Preservation Bureau used to rent for the buffalo..."
> >
> > And of course, they *always* end with "You can't miss it."
>
> Some comedian somewhere altered that to "...you can't help but miss it."
>
> This became a watchphrase in my family for a long, long time. All of us
> have/had a good sense of direction and a memory for landmarks. We've all
> gotten very frustrated at times from receiving bad directions. I'm
> personally quite un-fond of New Englanders in that respect. Yes, I know the
> roadnet was set up in the old days and more or less at random, but Great
> Ghu you'd think they'd know which way North is!

Some USians seem to use roads as a marker to orient themselves. Which is
fine a lot of the time, but fails when you get to those roads that are
simultaneously somethingNorth and somethingElseEast.

Bad directions can be.. interesting. And usually make me wince because
the speaker could have used a perfectly good set of landmarks to
describe the route.

Catja
.

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