Distance perception

[chickenfeet]

I've just received an invitation to a drinks reception with the new Vice-Chancellor of Durham. Now, this reception is at the University of British Columbia, which is, predictably, in British Columbia which is to say roughly 4500km away, which is only marginally closer than Durham. Do you think they would expect someone from, say, Omsk or Dakar, to pop over to Durham for drinkies? It's the same distance.

Comments

[longpig.livejournal.com]

Haha... So many people just can't conceive of how *big* Canada is. I always get a kick out of it. When I used to work in reservations this came up all the time with people thinking they could just hop over from Toronto to PEI for the day or what have you; nd just the other day, my friend from Ireland messaged me asking how hard it would be for me to come over to Vancouver for the weekend because his brother was in town...

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

My favourite is a WW2 story of an English family who were sending their kids to relatives in Vancouver. In those days, of course, it was steamer to Halifax followed by train to Vancouver. The English family cabled to see whether someone could meet the kids in Halifax and got the reply "You meet them, you are closer".

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

My two PhD students who graduated last year were very interested in jobs at Memorial, because of the 5-hour direct flight to LGW (or maybe it was LHR). (It is kind of neat, actually, that such a flight exists...)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

... well St. John's is 1300 km closer to London than Halifax is! St. John's is actually equidistant from Vancouver and Moscow.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

It's the same with the states. OTOH, I'm having a very hard time getting adjusted to the tiny distances between things east of the Mississippi.

[gillo]

And there was me thinking that an invitation to join Durham people for a reception in London was a fair way - it's over a hundred miles, after all...