the world: places

I was taught in second grade that the earth was flat at the poles. Second grade to Fifth grade i believed that we lived near the poles, because i couldn't see the ground curving.

When my parents took my brother and me to St. Louis, I thought people there spoke a different language.
(I grew up in Indiana.)

After my first trip on a subway, I thought that there were two levels of the Earth and that half of the world's population had to live underground. I used to feel sorry for them because they weren't able to see the sky.

I used to believe that by digging in the sandbox, at my daycare, I would eventually make it to China. My friends and I would dig every day and when we hit the bottom or the sides we thought it was just earth's core.

I used to believe that there was only China, America, and Canada in the world. I was in Canada and China was in America.

I used to think maps and globes were somehow connected to places they represent, so if you touched a point on the map, in that part of the world a giant finger would come out of the sky. I refused to touch maps until I was about 8 years old, because "what if my finger hurts someone?"

I have family in several different states, and when I was little, every time someone would talk about these family members, I imagined that they lived crowded together in a long, white hallway, because obviously Ohio was the only state where people had houses and such.

i used to beleive that no one was born outside of the US. i could never understand why anyone would ever leave.

I got the word immigrant confused with terrorist. I moved to the US when I was 4 and I used to think I was a terrorist instead of an immigrant.

When my mom was little her map of the U.S. had our state (Ohio) green and the other states were a variety of other colors. My mother then believed that the grass in other states was the color on the map. She wouldn't believe my grandma that they were in Michigan because the grass wasn't purple.

I was born and raised in NY. For the longest time, I used to think that every single person in the world was born in NY and then decided to either stay or move away.

I used to believe that there were only office buildings in Manhattan and only zoos and farms on Staten Island.

I used to believe that each US state was a different country, and each of those countries spoke different languages. I was confused for a while about why my grandparents spoke English if they were from a different state.

My daughter Stella, who is 10 years old, just told me that when she was younger she thought that asking for country's capital city name was equivalent to asking for the country "pet name". That is certainly because - to a kid - the word "Brasilia" sounds like a "pet name" to the word "Brazil" and not the actual name of our capital city. In Brazil we also have a state called "Goiás" whose capital is "Goiânia", another "pet name" in her mind. And then, the funniest of all, was that she then concluded that France's capital would be "Francine".

My older brother once told me that there were 52 states because of Puerto Rico and Alaska. Needless to say, I failed a lot of quizzes about the USA. And to this day I wonder what the other extra state must have been.

My older brother told me that Mt. Rushmore wasn't carved by anyone -- the rocks just "grew up" in that shape. "how could anyone have made it?" I said maybe Superman carved it, because he could fly and carve at the same time. My mother almost fell off the couch, laughing.