Similar Sounding Foreign Places
Places with similar sounding names often caused confusion in geography tests at school. So it was kind of fun to write a blog about real world instances, where such confusion cost more than just a top grade. I remember my friend who was supposed to pick up his wife at the airport when she landed in the US. His wife told him she was landing in New York, when in fact she was landing at Newark! My friend ended up at the wrong airport, but fortunately, Newark is just half an hour driving distance from the more famous city. The next incident was after the Boston marathon bombings this year. The bombers were identified as ex-Chechyans but many Twitter users confused that with the Czech Republic! Very bad publicity for the Czechs, right? So much so that Petr Gandalovič, the Czech Ambassador to the US, had to issue a statement: “The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Feder...