the world

I live in Baltimore, Maryland, and I used to think that Maryland was the name of my city and Baltimore was the name of my state! I also thought that you had to get searched when you crossed state boarders, but not when you crossed national boarders. Boy was I confused when we went to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents!

I was about six or seven when Clinton was having the sex scandal, and one day I walked into the room and asked why mom was watching the news. She said that they were trying to decide whether they should impeach the president or not. I thought that impeach meant to throw peaches at a person, and like dump cans of peaches over their heads. I wanted him to get impeached so that I could watch the president all covered in peaches!

My sister used to think that Sheffield (the city we live in) was actually a country, and that England was a city in the country of Sheffield. We had many many arguments about that, and I won eventually when mum and dad agreed with me.

when i was a kid i used to believe that service-station attendants were the richest people in the world. that's because they had all this money in their pockets when it was time to pay after refueling

As a toddler my parents took me on my first airplane trip to visit relatives in Indianapolis. I believed that because we had to take a plane to get there that the city was actually located up in the sky. Even after our visit, I continued to believe that all of my cousins were living up there somewhere in the sky.

I used to believe…

a friend of mine during geography class asked if the earth was round then why did it take so much time for travelling frm us to australia when they could go the other way round it would be faster.
answer her!

A while ago, I was babysitting and the little girl, stacie, came running up to me and said 'The Princess of Wales has died?' I told her yes, it was quite the tragedy and she asked me why everyone was making a big deal about it. Then she promptly pulled out a map and pointed to the little island of Wales off of Canada and said: 'That island's small! It ain't even fit for me'. Of course, I had to show her where Wales really was and even then she didn't believe me! Ah, kids :)

In early 1990, our school was one of the first from the West to visit the former GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having grown up to fear the horrors of communism, we fully believed that everyone in the GDR must be starving and miserable, and when our minibus approached Halle, we were all terrified because we thought we'd be staying in these tiny little sheds, crammed up close together, with miniscule plots of land in front of them, where they were growing cabbages because there was nothing else to eat. It was only when we reached the city centre that we discovered that these were people's gardening allotments and that everyone lived in normal flats with electricity, hot water, toilets and shop-bought food, and had done for the past few decades.

Growing up in the UK in the 80s, I thought Margaret Thatcher was married to Michael Foot, the left-wing leader of the opposition, and that all the stuff on the news about her being the Iron Lady and him being a hopeless old lefty was to do with the fact that she bullied him at home and wouldn't do the cooking and stuff.

I had just discovered the vast world of online...and my dad let me IM someone for the first time. I asked them where they were from and they said "Portland". Me being about 7 I thought Poland not Portland, Oregon. So I was like "That is so awesome!" Later my dad told me that Portland was NOT a foreign country.

When I was about 5, my brother was watching a football(American) game with the Chicago Bears playing someone, but i forget who. Whoever they were, my brother was rooting for them and not the Bears so when he said "Oh no! A Bear made a touchdown" I got this image in my head of an actual bear wandering the football field, making a touchdown, and that this is somehow upsetting to my brother. I still laugh when I think of this image.

I used to believe…

people where I live are always complaining about Bosnians, so one day my confused little sister said "there are Bosnians all over the place, aren't there? they must have a lot of kids!" she thought that 'Bosnian' was a surname and that all the Bosnians were part of the same huge family!

In the 8th grade we were having a class discussion about poverty and this one guy raises his hand and says "Why doesn't the gov. just print more money?" We're all like "huh?" And he continues all sure of himself "They have the machines to do it, why don't they just make more money?"

I used to think that people from different states(I live in the USA) spoke different languages. When my parents told me we were leaving going to Colorado for a vacation one year, I became terrified that I would have to learn Spanish! Thankfully, however, I understood everyone there. In fact, my younger self might be surprised to learn from my older self that, living in Arizona, most people seem to a speak a different language from me IN state!

I thought that cashiers gave people change because the people were too short on cash. (For example, with a $10 purchase, I thought that the customers the cashier $8 and the cashier gave the customer $2.)

When we were little me and my twin sister thought that America was the world and that every house was a country. So whenever we drove by houses we'd shout THERE'S CHINA! and when we ran out of countries we'd make them up. For instance THERE'S INGASHMITEN!

I was on the bus one day when I was little and I saw a man wearing a turban. I was really excited because I thought he was a genie (I think Aladin had just come out). My aunt explained to me that he was sikh and I was really upset.

When I was a child there was this certain filed where we would always go for a picnic on Easter. So I got the idea that that place WAS Easter, rather than Easter being a day.