Not from around here

[cos]

One day this summer, I was walking somewhere near Central Square, when a woman with a foreign-sounding accent and two teenage sons approached me to ask which way it was to "the university". She seemed surprised when I asked her which university she meant. She asked me, wasn't there a university nearby? She thought there was, didn't I know where it was? She had some trouble coming up with its name.

It reminded me of the time I was driving with a friend from California, and in the middle of Connecticut she thought she recognized the name of a town on an exit sign, as a town she had read about somewhere. To confirm if she were remembering the right name, she asked if I knew whether there was a lake in that town.

Comments

[ron_newman]

What happened next in the first conversation? Did she eventually recognize either 'Harvard' or 'MIT' as the name of the place she was looking for?

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

The University. Because the Cambridge area has only one, don'cha know.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I'm recalling Richard Feynman at an airport equidistant from two universities trying to tell the cabbie which one will have his physics convention. The Central Square version of this would be:

"Oh, so this is Mass Ave, which is an ironic name since it's two lanes. There's the very geeky but major school down that way and the preppy major school up that way. Pick your poison, please."

[kirin]

You get the weirdest comment spam. The last one google-translates to:
"It is also a self-satisfaction but,
In the opposite situation, or the kind of wedding dinner in their hotel
There is little sense of glad to be invited to the event."

And on top of that, there's not even any links. What sort of incompetent spammers are these?

[cos]

Now I wish I hadn't deleted the other five spam comments in Chinese before you got here to translate them for me :)