Dutch student flies to wrong Sydney.

Oh, poor kid...

If nothing else he will have learned something. He could have looked around Toronto, I'm sure there's something to see.

Actually, Sydney, Canada is way out east in the Atlantic. The kid was closer to New York than to Toronto. Although the place absolutely has tons of beaches, yesterday the high temperature in the middle of the afternoon was 29 °F, (-2°C).

March was bad timing for the mistake. Tourism is a big industry there, but I suspect it's winter sports and people looking to escape the midsummer heat. If he had gone in July, he might have had a great time.

But there's Murdoch Mysteries, he could at least have got a T **** or a magnifying glass, or even a black homburg.

Here in Britain, we get lots of tourists going to the wrong places by train, They confuse: Liverpool, the city in NW England 180 miles from London, and Liverpool Street, a central London rail terminal, Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare lived, and Stratford, an East London suburb. Lots more confusions like that happen. they provide a humorous read in the newspapers, "dumb tourist" stories go down quite well, but one I hadn't known about until the other day is the Abbey Road stop on the Docklands Light Railway. Apparently hordes of camera-toting tourists arrive there looking for the road crossing on the cover of a Beatles album. They want take photos of each other holding up and dodging the traffic (or not, sometimes). Unfortunately the station called Abbey Road is 10 miles away from the Beatles place, which is near St Johns Wood tube station. Transport for London have placed jokey notices to advise them what to do:


(This is priceless!) There is even a live webcam feed so you can see dumb tourists arsing around, annoying drivers. With sound, so you can hear all the horns beeping. I have just been watching it for a few minutes. Some of their antics are amazing! Some of them just stand around in the roadway or jump in front of cars! Or adopt "I'm standing here pretending to walk like a Beatle" poses, or do a slow walk with their arms swinging, while trucks bear down on them. To a British person the behaviour of some is very scary.

https://www.abbeyroad.com/crossing

Locals say it is only a matter of time before someone is killed.



I am not sure if the woman above was a tourist. The local authority is considering removing the crossing.

That cam is amazing! One older looking guy with long white hair has been back and forth about 10 times, and got beeped during several.

Not only that they can't get a Beatles copy unless they've got a step ladder for the photographer.

I saw someone on that live cam with a phone on a kind of long stick thing, like a long selfie stick, they were waving it in the air and shouting at some people on the crossing and a Tesco home delivery van nearly took him out. Great fun.

Every little helps.

I think a lot of them are from countries where they drive on the right, because they keep getting surprised by vehicles coming up behind them. I'm hoping for a white-van-man to get out and lamp one of them.

It's the only way they'll learn.

Considering the money Britain has made off the Beatles and British Invasion generally, you ought to have a special tourist force assisting the visitors with the cameras. Or have a professional photogropher permanently stationed there to assist them for a fee with uniformed traffic monitors redirecting oncoming autos..

They take their chances same as everyone else, it's not any different for those of us who live here.

The people who live there didn't travel thousands of miles just to get their picture taken like the album of Britain's national heroes. And they need traffic monitors, what with Brits driving on the wrong side of the road and all. Surprises people.

We don't drive on the wrong side of the road. If you are riding horseback with a sword, it's strung on your left. If you ride on the right hand side of the road your swords clash against each other. It makes sense.

I'm sure those people travelling over here aren't just coming to see a zebra crossing. We do have other attractions. There's always Heddon Street in London where you can have your photo taken without standing in the middle of the bloody road.

Some are just regular tourists doing all the tourist things, but you get a lot of obsessive Beatles fans, especially from Japan, where they also drive on the left.

Well that street is very nice looking, but it doesn't appear on the cover of what many people think is the Beatles' greatest album.

Oh, I'm not recommending the behavior at all, it is obsessive. Only thing is, considering the contribution of the Beatles to culture generally, not just music, it might not be such a bad idea to make a special exhibit and arrangement for that corner.

Or Battersea Power station. (Now Pig free)



Or Salford Lad's Club, if you get out of the capital and happen to be a bit angsty.