the world

My grandmother lived in Miami when I was a child, and when my mother told me we were to go vist her, I thought she was saying "We're going to my ami" (whatever an "ami" was). I was convinced the city belonged to her, and told all my friends that I was going to my mommy's ami.

When I was in grade school we were learning about the Presidents. Well I knew the first one was George Washington (because he was on the $1 dollar bill)well I ALWAYS thought Abraham Lincoln was the second President(Because he's on the $5 dollar bill)so I also thought that the third president was Hamilton and so on and so forth... I had misunderstood my teacher. She must have said that Lincoln might have been the sencond most important president. I believed this until I was in late teens...

When I was eleven, I had a theory that there was exactly so much money in the world that you could pay for every single thing that exists on Earth. But there was a problem: while both the money and the things themselves were considered valuable, only the things had actual value - the value of money was only symbolic. So our economic system assumed that there was twice as much wealth in the world than there actually was. This made the system inherently unstable and created a need to devalue money and property. That was my explanation for inflation.

As a child in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, UK I couldn't quite understand why the capital of Poland was so near - I thought there was a geographical timewarp that confused Walsall with Warsaw!

My sister had asked me how the Statue of Liberty got all the way from France to the U.S. Being the big sister I explained how 100 men swam it accross the ocean and were too tired to bring it on land and that is why it is in the NY harbor. Later that week she came home and hit me in the shoulder, hard! Apparently she believed it and shared it with the class. He he he! (20 years later she still belives my stories!)

As I child I used to wonder how letters could be sent from one country to another when one only paid postage in one country. Who paid for the letter being forwarded in its destination country? So I imagined all the post offices all over the world meticulously keeping track of how many letters from each country they transported, and then at the end of the year they would bill each other.

I grew up watching the Toronto Blue Jays. The first few seasons were kind of traumatic for me. Every time a guy struck out, or grounded into a double-play, I thought his career was over. These guys would walk back, dejected, to their dugouts, and I wondered where they would find a replacement. The announcers screwed me up - they kept saying the batter was "retired"! I was horrified every time a pitcher would strike out all three batters, and the announcer would scream that the pitcher had "retired the side"! Meanies...

Peter Pan was one of my favourite children's stories. And because of that I was always interested in people talking about the Netherlands even if they insisted on using the abbreviated name for the Never Never lands.

When I was little and I saw Indian, Hindu etc. people with little red Bindi dots on their foreheads I would marvel at how those people all got 'pimples' in the same place.

Like all kids I liked watching TV. Even though the news was boring, I usually kept it on while I played. But I always wondered why all news anchors had an ami and no one else I knew had one. Not that I knew what an ami was. You see the news anchor once in awhile would say "In My Ami today........" (Miami).

When I was young, I thought lesbians were citizens from Lebabanon. I remember seeing an episode of Night Court in which some character says "Christine, I'm a lesbian!" and begins to kiss the surprised Christine and for a few years after that I thought that people from Lebanon had some rather interesting social customs. I found it a bit strange,but I knew that Mongolians stick out their tongues in greeting and it seemed to just be one of those things...

When I was young, I would listen to people talk about "foreigners" and think they were referring to the inhabitants of some specific country. So, one beautiful day, my dad asked me "Do you know where foreigners come from, dear?", to which I hesitantly replied: "Uh... From Foreign?..."

Growing up in Sweden in the 1960's I wasn't exposed to a lot of foreign influence and didn't quite understand racial differences. Someone had told me that "negroes" (the proper term used in Sweden for black people) originated in Africa. So for me, this became a nationality rather than a race. I refused to see black people from any other continent as black. You could only be black if you came from Africa. My parents had also given my a black doll (Ada, my favorite) and it never occured to me that she was of a different race than my friends dolls. I just thought she was prettier then theirs because she had more colour and beautiful brown eyes.

I used to be certain that the carving of the 3 presidents in the USA was natural and that it was just a coincidence that they bore a resemblence to real presidents. I was 20 and studying for a degree before i was informed that this was not the case.

When I was little I believed that all countries and continents were actually floating on the water and not attached to the earth. I could never work out why they didnt float around all over the place though!

my boyfriend's daughter when she was about 5 or 6, everytime they drove by the ABC store (Alcoholic Beverage Stores in the States) she would beg her dad to take her into the "toy" store. She refused to believe that they didn't sell toys until he took her in and showed her that all they had was bottles!!

As the child of a Baptist minister and sheltered from "things of the world", I was a college student when I learned that a package store is not where you go to buy packages to wrap your gifts in!

For some reason, I used to think that there was a big red button in the middle of the President's desk, and if he pressed it the whole world would explode. I also didn't think it was a very well-guarded button, and I always worried that he would accidentally lean on it.

One day, must have been around the New Year, I asked my Dad why the College Football Bowl Games had such crazy names: the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, Gator Bowl, etc. He told me that they used whatever object was in the title of the game as a substitute ball. For example, for the Rose Bowl a rose was used, for the Orange Bowl a bag of oranges was used and for the Gator Bowl, a baby alligator was attached by its teeth to the players jersey who would then run up the field with it. As a child of 6 or 7 it sounded pretty logical to me. And the sad part is I don't think I realized he was pulling my leg for about 10 years after that!