the world

I seriously believed for some time that Watergate was about a huge (and apparently long-lasting!) flood caused by the president who had screwed up and left a big Gate open and lots of Water came through it, which explained why people were mad at him. I was convinced that this had all been on the news. My guess now is that I had been seeing TV reports about major flooding on the East Coast in 1972 from Hurricane Agnes, at about the same time as the Watergate burglary, so when they started talking about Watergate, I just combined the news stories in my mind...

When my sister and I were little, we convinced our younger brother that nickles were worth more than dimes because they were bigger in size. My brother easily traded his dimes for our nickles (sometimes even more than one!). We made off with quite a bit of moola until we got caught! :)

When I was little, I thought that Mississippi was a real person. Ithought she was called Ms. Issippi and she was the queen of her country. I thought that she had to go to war with Norway and I called it The Battle of Mississippi. I thought that Norway was a desert like Arizona and that there were big floaty monsters in the caves. You don't want to know the dreams I had on the topic.

I used to think the man on the dime was Arnold Palmer.

I used to think that Holland was an island near Australia. But when in an anime a girl traveled by train from France to Holland, I was enlightened. Not to mention sort of surprised. Holland was portrayed as so cute, it seemed too exotic to be located other than in Oceania.

I kept hearing my husband say that "AL needs a Visa" to return her for work. Well, one day I said to my Hubby "Why don't we get him a card under our account" Boy was I ridiculed about that. I believed a visa was a charge card......I was 35 yrs old!!

As I loved geography and maps as a small kid, I would look through the pre-Interstate System maps of the United States (1950s). For many years I would examine Washington, D. C. metro maps. At the same time, I looked all over Washington State trying to figure out where Washington, D. C. was. It HAD to be near Seattle?
Washington, D. C. had U.S. 50 running near it but couldn't for the life of me find U.S.50 on the Washington State maps or in the Tacoma-Seattle area. There
was New York, New York, so there had to be a Washington, D. C., Washington . . . right?

When we were selling our furniture, a Dutch family came over to view the beds. Their son was like 6'5" and when they left, my sister asked why Dutch people were so tall. My dad told my sister that this was because Dutch people put their children in growbags, to make them tall. My sister believed this for about a year and told just about everyone she knows, including teachers :P She was 9.

He also told her last Christmas that a news flash on Sky News had just told him that Santa Claus had died, after being electrocuted by fairy lights. I'm beginning to think my dads a bit of a sadist :P

i used 2 belive that when u went 2 mexio u will go 2 a different planet.

When I was young, my aunt lived in a small northern Canadian town called Cassiar. Having learned a bit of world geography by looking at a globe with my dad, I thought she lived in Madagascar.

I think I must have once followed my Mom to the bank while she got something out of a small safe or something when I was young, because I believed that the way banks worked (having never gone with her to the bank before, and not going with her again later) was that everyone with an account had their own locked drawer. You'd go to the bank, then someone would take you to a room where there were walls and walls of little drawers, and you kept your money in that drawer.

When she explained it to me a bit, about how banks will give your money to other people, but they keep track of how much money you have, I figured that they just had a gigantic safe (with a huge combination lock on the front), like in cartoons, that was just piled up with money tossed everywhere. When you deposited money, they opened the door and threw it in. When you withdrew money, they went into the safe and got the money you asked for.

I still thought it was mean that they gave your money away, though.

I once had a friend who, presumably because there are so many American movies on TV, seemed convinced that everything he saw on TV was in America. There was a rugby match on one day, and he said "That rugby's coming from Scotland. Scotland's in America". To which his Dad answered "Everything's in America as far as he's concerned".

When I was really little, I believed that there were actually two Texases. I would constantly refer to "the other Texas".

There was, of course, the Texas I lived in, with cities and subdivisions and Wal-Marts, and then there was the "other" Texas, with cowboys and Indians and cattle ranches all over the place.

Severely disillusioned as I was, it took quite a while to grasp this new concept, otherwise known as the passage of time.

When I was 5 years old and living in Texas, my mom and I flew to Michigan to visit family on a regular basis. I had trouble with the terms "north" and "up there".
At the time I thought that to get to Michigan, the airplane had to fly straight up, like a super elevator taking us to a floor way up on a high rise. I spent some time trying to figure out how far away Michigan really was if each state had it's own layer. I'm now a social studies teacher and have to giggle when I think about my early impressions of US geography.

When I was about six years old I figured out that a penny was worth a cent because it had one cent's worth of copper in it. A nickel had five cents' worth of nickel, a dime had ten cents' worth of silver, etc.

Dollar bills I decided were worth a dollar because the printing process was so expensive.

I used to believe that when I touched a certain spot on a map or globe, that I was in fact pushing that place and squishing people.

I felt bad about it, but at the same time couldn't help pushing.