Travel Queries A Passport To The Absurd
Travel agents earn their keep. Just look at this sampling of questions compiled by one agent, who wisely chooses to remain anonymous.
“My tour is going to England, then to Scotland. Do I need two different passports to do that?”
“Hey, what the hell is the matter with you?! I wanted information on escorted tours in Scotland, but you sent me a catalog for Great Britain!
“I decided to use my local travel agent to book that airpass fare you told me about, but she doesn’t know how to book it. Can you explain it to her?”
“How much does it cost to eat in London?”
“I see from the flight itinerary you sent me that there is no flight from our first tour site in Dublin to our second one in Wales. How are we getting there? By bus?”
And the agent’s personal favorite: “So, when it’s time for our tour to leave the U.S. for England, what do we do, go to the airport?”
Flocks of Canadians: A total of 15.3 million Canadians visited the United States in 1996, accounting for about 33 percent of the total of 46.3 million visitors.
Mexicans were the second-largest group, with 8.5 million visitors, accounting for 18 percent.
The largest group of visitors to the United States from outside North America was the Japanese, with 5 million visitors, or 11 percent.
“Call me Ishmael:” A 24-hour, nonstop reading of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” begins at noon Jan. 3 at the Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Celebrities, relatives of Melville, politicians, and literature lovers will be among those reading 10-minute blocks of this whale of a novel.
If you happen to be in the neighborhood, you, too, can participate. To find out more, or to reserve a reading slot, call the museum at (508) 997-0046, ext. 14, or e-mail imarks3519@aol.com.
Fear of flying: More than 45 million Americans fear flying, according to a new poll.
But, according to the Air Transport Association, in a given three-month period more people die on the highway than in all of the accidents in the history of U.S. commercial aviation.
Best hotels: Here are the picks of Innkeeping World, a Seattle-based trade publication, for the best hotels in the world for superior guest services:
1) The Peninsula, Hong Kong; 2) The Ritz-Carlton, Chicago; 3) The Regent, Hong Kong; 4) Hotel Ritz, Paris; 5) The Oriental, Bangkok; 6) Mauna Lani Bay Hotel, Kohala, Hawaii; 7) Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, Hamburg, Germany; 8) Four Seasons Hotel, London; 9) The Clift Hotel, San Francisco; and 10) Imperial Hotel, Tokyo.
Speak body language: “In the People’s Republic of China, spitting in public is almost commonplace because there it is regarded as an act of hygiene,” says Roger E. Axtell in his newly expanded edition of “Gestures, The Do’s and Taboos of Body Language Around the World” (John Wiley & Sons, $15.95).
Other gleanings from the book: In France, if you play an imaginary flute, you are sending a signal saying: “You are talking so long, I am getting bored.”
Latins and Middle Easterners stand much closer than Americans, sometimes toe to toe. They may even place a hand on the other’s forearm or elbow, or finger the lapel of the other person.
In Turkey, inadvertently pointing the sole of your shoe at someone is an insult; and the “tch” sound means no.