the world

My grandparents on both sides came to Australia with their families from Britain in the 1920s, as did many of their friends and, like many Australians, still referred to Britain as "home". This was very confusing to me as a child, trying to imagine a house so huge as to have so many people in it. Then one day I saw a picture of Buckingham Palace - ah! - that explained it! I had a rather grandiose idea of my family origins for years afterwards.

My father, trying to explain maps to me, aged six, showed me Australia and said,"That's where we live". It didn't look much like our house, but adults have funny ways of representing things. But I thought I had it all worked out, and triumphantly said, "And that's where Leonie lives!", pointing to New Guinea, just to the north (Leonie was my friend who lived across the road). Dad patiently explained that it was New Guinea, but I knew that we had lived in New Guinea when I was smaller, and that I had never lived in Leonie's house, so put the whole conversation down to overactive adult imagination.

I used to think when I was little that you had to actually make your money by cutting out pices of paper and use a pencil to draw the faces of the presidents. I thought this for many years until my mom told me about money and how i should save it up.

I believed this for a long time (longer than I'd care to admit!): I knew that midgets were referred to as "little people" and for years I thought that Reno was a big city of little people because it is known as "the biggest little city on earth".

i also used 2 think that on maps of the world etc if i sqinted really, really hard i could see my street, my house-everything!
so i tried it one day. i was bitterly dissapointed when i cuoldent see my house.
i decided i needed glasses so i pinched my sisters
:(

I used to believe that a pool cue stick was a Q-stick, and that there must be a connection between Q-sticks and Q-tips, perhaps because both were sticks with something white on the end.

I used to belive that New York City was in California untill I was About 10 when I asked my mom where New York City was and she told me it was in New York after that I felt Realy Dumb

When you are little the world fills up bit by bit with foreign countries. At the time I'm thinking of I at least knew there was America, Germany, Poland and Eskimoland, with just that minimum image of each to be going on with (never mind how crazy with hindsight). But there was also Switzerland which maybe wasn't a proper country, you never saw it in newsreels or heard it mentioned in news bulletins or newsreels for instance, but on the other hand every day I saw our 'Made in Switzerland' clock so it had to be a half-real country at least. But frustratingly I knew two and only two things associated with the Swiss to construct an image with, Swiss mountains which were big hills and Swiss rolls. Putting this scanty material together I guessed a good way of moving around in mountains would be to roll down them. I formed this image which has never quite abandoned me, of lots of Swiss people rolling bumpily down these vast slopes. That raised an obvious problem - not even knowing of ski-lifts I just lived with the idea they never went uphill, they started life at the top and never went back.
I disagreed with the philistine way adults ate Swiss rolls, cutting a slice and just eating it like an ordinary piece of cake; I insisted on eating them as they were meant to be, from the outside in. I vaguely remember this being tolerated while a parental line was drawn at my eating them from the inside out. One day with my parents on a shopping expedition I discovered carpet rolls in which they were taking an great interest. These obviously suggested Swiss rolls, and I also realised it would be a more comfortable ride to roll down a mountain inside one. I imagined Swiss people, more often than wrapping them around, climbing into the middle of one of these rolls when they had to go somewhere.


At some point though I knew more words of Swiss than I did of any other foreign language. I remember the words were yodeledi yodeledi yedi ledidee. Not an encouraging start for language learning: not only I didn't know what any of those words meant, but I thought I couldn't hope to master the difficult pronunciation of this language. Still, the rhythm of those words was just right for Swiss to sing them in their outlandish tongue in synch with the rotations as they rolled down the mountains in their carpets.

i used to believe (until a day ago) that amsterdam was a country...
and that banga university is in india

I remember when I was younger and saw people wearing sweatshirts from the Superbowl with the number across the shirt in roman numerals, I thought the letters were the size of the shirt. I didn't know what roman numerals were at the time so that made the most sense to me at the time.

when i was younger i used to belive that them where lots of little men printing money out of the cash machine for the people that wanted it and you could have as much as you wanted.

I used to think that in basketball, with baskets at both ends of the court, a player could shoot a basket into either goal, and it would count for his team, that neither basket applied specifically to one team. In fact, when I saw some gyms with up to six baskets around the court, I thought a player could score a goal for his team by throwing the ball into any one of the six baskets.

My sister told me once that when the new years eve ball dropped in NYC, that it actually dropped and broke opena nd that little totsie rolls flew out and all the people ran to get them. It was only when I was fianally old enough to stay up and see the ball drop, and i sw that they were lowering it slowly, and then when it got to the bottom, no tootsie rolls came out, i started crying.

When I was in first grade there was a poster in my classroom of children of the world in cultural dress. For some reason, the children from Thailand had very long fingers. For years I believed that they were born that way.

I was absolutely horrified to find out that a president could be elected before everyone - ie ALL voters - had agreed to who was the best candidate. I thought the job was much too important to hire someone lots of people didn't want.

I grew up in southern North Carolina, about as close as one can get in North Carolina to the towns of Camden and Florence in South Carolina. Long before I'd ever been to Camden or Florence or places in between, I had recurrent dreams about traveling from Camden to Florence and in my deams, the route between the two always passed among large mountains. By the time I actually travelled from Camden to Florence, I had learned enough to not really expect substantial mountains, but still I was somewhat disappointed at how totally flat that area turned out to be. Since then, I've learned to take some solace in the fact that somewhere north of there, between the route from Camden to Florence and the North Carolina line, there are some interesting rocky areas, hills, and even a small "mountain", including Forty Acre Rock, the Sandhills, and Sugarloaf Mountain.