Unknown customs that make a foreigner look foolish

When at a Waitrose store in Bath, England, yesterday and purchasing a reporter's notebook – a great writing pad that I've never seen for sale in North America, it having the perfect dimensions of not being too small or large - I checked it through a self-checkout only to find the machine wouldn't tally my payment. I had to call an attendant, whose long beard made him look like a philosophy professor. He took my item and simply moved it from a lower shelf to an upper shelf at the top of the till. I’d never seen this kind of configuration, at home having a till where you move items in parallel from one side to the other. 

At the Bath RR station waiting for the Great Western Railway train to London Paddington, the announcement says that first class loading is from Zones 1 and 2. Where are the platform zone numbers? There are numbers posted above but they seem haphazard. I had to ask a railway attendant (always wearing orange vest). He pointed to the other end of the platform, and then I saw them, circles painted on the platform floor with the zone numbers. A lot of the time you wouldn’t see these because the platforms are so crowded. 

Finally, after exiting the Elizabeth Line station in central London and walking to my bus stop I see a “diversion” (detour) notice asking me to “read down.” Only there’s no information when I look down the bus stop pole. It’s not until I walk a little ahead do I notice the information on the side of the pole indicating the next closest stop.    

There have been a couple of other mishaps recently with maps or wayfinding. Yesterday in Bath (photo: Bath's Roman Baths)I exited the surprisingly small station (for a city of 100,000) over what I thought was a river to the centre of town (it was a canal). But if this was the centre of historic Bath – a highly popular tourist destination for its Georgian architecture and Jane Austen legacy – then this was disappointing indeed. Yes, there were some fine historical residences but not much traffic and only a small commercial area, where I stopped to buy a cappuccino. There, speaking to a young family, I asked if  I’d gone the wrong way out of the train station. Yes, “there’s a tunnel,” they said, leading into the main city itself. And, yes there was, I eventually found, and leading into a vast commercial and historic quarter just teaming with shops, restaurants and people! Amazing how it’s possible to get directions so wrong having consulted my Lonely Planet map. .... And last week in Cambridge, leaving the train station and consulting the Here We Go app, I was told to walk way off in a different direction to find Trumpington Rd., leading to the city centre. I found it alright, but by a great circuitous route that probably took a half hour longer than if I’d just walked down the street straight from the station., downtown Cambridge being a mile and a half from the railway. 

- Ron Stang, Windsor Ontario Canada, a frequent traveller