On 12 May 2008 (Neil Williams) wrote
in :

On Sun, 11 May 2008 19:48:05 +0100, Arthur Figgis
wrote:

Is it true that the Japanese don't really go in for payment by
card, and happily carry around large amounts of cash instead?

I believe so. Cash machines are also less common than over here
and tend to open only business hours - so another reason not to
get "caught short". The crime rate is very low, though, so the
chance of it getting nicked is fairly small.

Indeed, I once gave a hotel receiptionist when she told me I was too
early to use the cash machine! They also have a lot of cash machines
that will only accept Japanese issued cards. Getting travelers cheques
changed can also be entertaining. Taking a lot of cash out with you is
the easiest option.

--
Graham Drabble
http://www.drabble.me.uk/

Boltar wrote:
On May 12, 2:14 pm, Michael Hoffman wrote:
If you're a tourist, RATP will try to sell you the overpriced Paris
Visite card instead of a Carte Orange. The cheapest Paris Visite cards
for a whole week (Zones 1-3) would cost EUR 41.50. Whereas a Carte
Orange would cost only 16.30 for 1-2 (and there is little of interest to
a tourist in zone 3) or 21.60 for 1-3.

Yes , but the visite card gets you discounts of a shed load of
tourists sights unlike the normal tickets. Depending on where you
visit in a week it could save you a lot of money.

Some places make it near impossible for tourists to buy the normal
ticket without the discounts for museums they don't want to visit -
Budapest was one, where they claim it is impossible to buy the day
ticket at the airport.

So you find yourself staggering into an dull exhibition twenty minutes
before it shuts, with an "I'm damned well going to get my money's worth
out of this blasted ticket" expression.

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

Boltar wrote:
On May 12, 2:14 pm, Michael Hoffman wrote:
If you're a tourist, RATP will try to sell you the overpriced Paris
Visite card instead of a Carte Orange. The cheapest Paris Visite cards
for a whole week (Zones 1-3) would cost EUR 41.50. Whereas a Carte
Orange would cost only 16.30 for 1-2 (and there is little of interest to
a tourist in zone 3) or 21.60 for 1-3.

Yes , but the visite card gets you discounts of a shed load of
tourists sights unlike the normal tickets.

As far as I can tell, the few sites (hardly a "shed load") where you get
a discount are mainly sites that most tourists would not visit
otherwise. I certainly have never felt the need to pay for any of these
dubious attractions.
--
Michael Hoffman

"Arthur Figgis" wrote in message
news:h_ydndKTCtfkKrXVnZ2dnUVZ8gydnZ2d@plusnet...

Some places make it near impossible for tourists to buy the normal ticket
without the discounts for museums they don't want to visit - Budapest was
one, where they claim it is impossible to buy the day ticket at the
airport.

So you find yourself staggering into an dull exhibition twenty minutes
before it shuts, with an "I'm damned well going to get my money's worth
out of this blasted ticket" expression.

--

Good cuisine in Budapest, however.

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 04:26:01PM -0700, MIG wrote:

Sorry I was out for a while, but it seems to me that the relationships
with English pronunciation are probably not the relevant ones.

Indeed. For looking out of the window of a train and realising "oh, I
need to get off here", what matters is that Russian (or Greek)
characters are pretty easy to recognise if you're literate in a language
that uses the Latin alphabet, even if you have no idea how KPACHbIE
BOPOTA is pronounced. That's because even if the letters appear to make
no sense (and some might be unrecognisable) there will be at least
*some* that you can easily remember, and then when you see the same name
again the whole name will be recognisable.

This does assume that it's in the same case as it was the first time you
saw it of course :-)

Japanese is an entirely different matter. Not a single character is
recognisable.

--
David Cantrell | Nth greatest programmer in the world

If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg
and egg whites, whisk, and place in a warm oven for 40 minutes.

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 02:48:16AM -0700, CJB wrote:

The situation would be marginally better if the airlines sold Oyster
cards on board, or if Oysters could be bought from vending machines.

I would stop moaning about Oyster if TfL bothered to put vending
machines at convenient places in south London. Y'know, I bet that
people like Tesco would be happy to have Oystery ticket machines in
their shops (for a small cut of course) so that people could renew
their travelcards or top up their pre-pay balance. It wouldn't be the
first time a large public company had put its facilities inside
supermarkets because it was convenient for their users - there's a post
box inside my local Tesco.

Unfortunately the only Oyster vending machine I have ever seen is at
London Bridge station, an area whose residents have tube stations
available.

--
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age

EIN KIRCHE! EIN KREDO! EIN PAPST!

Michael Hoffman wrote:
Boltar wrote:
On May 12, 2:14 pm, Michael Hoffman wrote:
If you're a tourist, RATP will try to sell you the overpriced Paris
Visite card instead of a Carte Orange. The cheapest Paris Visite cards
for a whole week (Zones 1-3) would cost EUR 41.50. Whereas a Carte
Orange would cost only 16.30 for 1-2 (and there is little of interest to
a tourist in zone 3) or 21.60 for 1-3.

Yes , but the visite card gets you discounts of a shed load of
tourists sights unlike the normal tickets.

As far as I can tell, the few sites (hardly a "shed load") where you get
a discount are mainly sites that most tourists would not visit
otherwise. I certainly have never felt the need to pay for any of these
dubious attractions.

We had a short visit to Paris in January and got the 3-day Zones 1-3
Paris Visite ticket for €19 and used it extensively on Metro, buses,
Montmartre funicular. We managed to use 4 of the discounted offers - Arc
de Triomphe, Opéra Nationale, Bâteaux Parisiens, Grand'Arche de la
Défense - and certainly didn't regard them as "dubious" attractions, and
all in all thought it quite good value. On previous visits I have used
the "Carte Orange", notably while camping out at Maisons-Laffite, but I
think it is not available for less than a week - and now comes in the
form of "Navigo" (French for Oyster!) and costing more for those not
resident in Ile-de-France.

Peter Beale

wrote:
"Arthur Figgis" wrote in message
news:h_ydndKTCtfkKrXVnZ2dnUVZ8gydnZ2d@plusnet...

Some places make it near impossible for tourists to buy the normal ticket
without the discounts for museums they don't want to visit - Budapest was
one, where they claim it is impossible to buy the day ticket at the
airport.

So you find yourself staggering into an dull exhibition twenty minutes
before it shuts, with an "I'm damned well going to get my money's worth
out of this blasted ticket" expression.

--

Good cuisine in Budapest, however.

We were too busy scoring otherwise empty photography museums at 18:40 to
notice the grub :-)

ISTR the railway museum wasn't included in the ticket (BICBW), which is
the one we actually wanted!

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

In article
,
alex_t writes

Pass! I would imagine that your operating system, if it's modern, is using
unicode internally, that your newsreader is using unicode represented as
UTF-8 (as you said), but that before it goes to the network, it's getting
encoded as KOI8. BICBW.

My "newsreader" is actually Google Groups - who known what weird
things Google's doing "out there" ;-)

Google handle KOI8 encoding properly - and UTF-8, too. Microsoft don't
(in Hotmail, at least).

Gives me no end of hassles in Mosocw.

(And to be within shouting distance of the topic, the worst thing on the
Moscow Metro is that the different lines in an interchange station will
all have their own station names, so Arbat is the same station as Lenin
Library (for instance))
--
Steve

On Tue, 13 May 2008, Steve wrote:

(And to be within shouting distance of the topic, the worst thing on the
Moscow Metro is that the different lines in an interchange station will
all have their own station names, so Arbat is the same station as Lenin
Library (for instance))

Same in New York, isn't it - 51st Street is also Lexington Avenue / 53rd
Street. Which is not to be confused with 5th Avenue / 53rd Street. Nor is
7th Avenue to be confused with 57th Street - 7th Avenue, nor that with
57th Street. It's okay to confuse 59th Street with Lexington Avenue / 59th
Street, though, since those *are* the same station. But not to confuse
50th Street with 50th Street, nor 23rd Street with any of 23rd Street,
23rd Street, 23rd Street, or 23rd Street.

Basically, pack of jokers.

Although i should confess that this kind of silliness does go on in London
- we've two each of Edgware Road, Paddington, Hammersmith and Shepherds
Bush. But only one case where a single station has two names.

tom

--
What's hit's history; what's missed's mystery.