the world: places

Until I was about 9 or 10, I truly believed Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomenon. Nobody told me it was. I just assumed the tourist attraction was a really big coincidence somehow involving the process of "erosion." (My dad was a geologist.) At some point in elementary school my teacher set me straight, but only after a lengthy and highly emotional discussion between us, during which I INSISTED in front of all the other kids that those presidential faces had randomly appeared over thousands of years of wind and rain pounding against the mountainside. I slinked home in humiliation afterwards. And I've never liked science since.

After I saw it being played at the Sony Style store in New York, I became convinced that Grand Theft Auto III took place in Portland, Oregon. This no doubt stemmed from the fact that there is a section of Liberty City called Portland View. I was then somewhat scared of Portland.

When I was 5 we rented a Cabana at the beach and I made a bunch of girlfriends. I went to play with them one day and noticed a huge hole had been dug in front of their Cabana. When I asked their father where they had gone he said, "they dug a hole to China, and said they'd be back tomorrow." I must have sat there for two hours trying to re open the collapsed sand hole to China which had caved in on the sides, to no avail. I was really excited to see they had returned the next day and had plenty of questions for them about China. They just shrugged it off as me being weird, I don't even think they knew what I was talking about!!! What a mean Parent to let me dig for so long in front of his Cabana and not even tell his daughters I was looking for them!!

When I was five I had a little children's book about the world. On the cover was little children in thier native dress holding hands circling around the whole world (read: the eskimo child was the size of freaking Europe!)

I was convinced the world was super tiny and Africa was a mere two houses away from our place. I would stand on our back patio listening to pigeons "coo-cooing" thinking I was in fact hearing tribal singing.

I used to think that no body lived in the others countries besides the US because they all came to America. I thought other courtries just were apart of "history" but no body lived there.

I used to think if I looked at a globe or map under a really strong magnifying glass, I could see the tiny people and animals covering Earth. I thought if I looked really close at Powell, Wyoming (my childhood home), I could see myself at the time the "picture" of the Earth was taken.

I used to believe walt disney was buried in disneyland because of that statue were he is next to mickey mouse. so i thought it was his tombstone.
yeah i thought that 4 a long time.

I used to believe…

that therewere only 2 countries in the world: Canada and the US

Until about age 7 or 8 I though that North Dakota had a coast, because it only had other states on 3 sides & my home state had 3 states & then the ocean on the 4th side.

My mum used to take me to preschool on her bike. On the way we'd pass a place where American troops stayed, near a defence base, and they flew the American flag (we're in Australia). For years I thought that I was visiting America on my way to preschool

When I was little and someone would talk about Greenland, they would always say things like "up to Greenland" (because it's up North, naturally), but I always understood it as if it was in the sky. So I was always looking for a gigantic, floating country in the sky...

When I was small I used to think Africa was one whole country

Growing up in the southern US, we would sometimes pass tobacco fields which had rows of leaf drying houses in them. There were no windows in those houses and my dad told us kids that blind people lived in those houses.

Every time we would pass them I would look to see if I could spot a blind person outside, and I thought that when I got older I would go and get them and tell them they were living in houses that had no windows and that wasn't fair.

The first time I was on a plane I looked out the window and saw the seperate plots of farmland. I thought I was looking at the state borders and I got really confused when I couldn't recognize any of the states!

I had heard of certain suburbs of big cities referred to as "bedroom communities" before I ever actually visited such a place. When I first did visit residents of such a suburb, I was very surprised to find that they lived in entire houses, and not just bedrooms.

The world is flat.