the world

I believed the line from the Australian national anthem was 'our land abounds in nature strips', not 'our land abounds in nature's gifts'. But it's true, my part of the country did have a lot of nature strips!

A friend had a penpal from Germany and the penpal went into deep detail of what a house looked like - thinking people in Australia have no idea what a house looks like!

When I was about 6 I thought that Sonoma was the last city. That you could go to other cities through one direction, but if you tried to go the other direction, you would walk off of the end of the earth.

When I was a really little kid, I thought that everyone in the U.S. lived in Ohio (where I lived). I knew there were other states, but I thought people just went there for vacation. I never realised that Ohio was way too tiny for those hundreds of millions of people to live...

My father came from a place called "The Heath" in County Laois, Ireland. He used to always tell us we were "Heath Men" which meant we were strong and proud. I always thought he was saying we were "Hate Men" and I would always get angry and smack things when he told us. Curiously, it took him a long time for him to realize what I was hearing.

Back when vending machines sold a cup of soda for a penny, I thought that if you inserted a copper penny, it would always give you Coca-Cola. If you inserted a war-time zinc penny, it always gave you a grape soda. Whenever I wanted a grape soda, I would ask my older sister to put in an "old black penny".

We rarely went to the beach when I was small. Being by the ocean, I was afraid, that at any time, pirates in an old Spanish type galleon would sail by and harrass the beach goers.

when i first learnt that the world was shaped like a ball i thought that all the people in austraila must have little suction pads that grow on their feet to stop them falling off i was terrified when my uncle moved there because, being born in england, he didn't have suction feet and would obviously fall to his doom as soom as he got off the plane

The first time I ever watched a Water Polo Event in the Olympics, I was seriously expected to see polo players sitting on horses splashing through the water. I'd love to say it was when I was very young...

i believed up until i was about 13 (im 15 now) that gunpoint was a real place, i got this because the news was always saying stuff like "10 tourists were held at gunpoint today, later released by police" so i told my parents i wanted to visit gunpoint someday....they got kinda scared...

I used to think that when you got a credit card, the company just took all your money and gave you a card of that value. When you bought something with it, it would be reprogrammed to reduce the amount of money.

I told a kid once that when you grow up you have to pay all sorts of taxes, like taxes on youre house and that sort of stuff. Then I told him with a completely straight face that there was such thing as a potato tax, for every potato you ate you would have to pay 7 cents. And he actually believed me....

I lived on the east coast of the US. When I was watching westerns at the movies, I thought the time frame of the story was contempory. I thought if you went "out West", there would be horses, wagons and no automobles and everyone lived like that as in the western movies.

When election time came, I used to think that whoever was up for nominations, (about ten or twelve in number) came in first, got the presidency, and the one who came in second, was vice president.

I used to think that you had to fly on a rocket to get to disney land. I thought this because i believed that other countries were in fact other planets, You'd have to travel across space to get there! I really wanted to go to disney land but never though i could because it was too unsafe and Mum didn't like me doing unsafe things!
Imagine my relief when i discovered that there was only one planet that I needed to travel around

The first time I saw professional boxing on television I was 5 years old. I believed that the fighter's were putting their teeth back in before a fight started and that they were angry at being without clothing. I was almost 10 when I actually tried boxing first hand and realized that my teeth and mouthguard both fit in my mouth, still I refused to let the other man get me in my underpants