the world: places

I think until I was like 12 I thought there were only like 3 countries in the world: the U.S., Russia and China. The U.S. and Russia were on this side of the world, and China was on the other side. This separation was due to the well known 'fact' that if you dug a deep enough hole, you would end up on the other side other world, in China. And Russia was in there because I think our history books talked about the "Cold War" with Russia and how little kids used to have the drills in school to prepare in case of attack. I remember when I first looked at a world map, I was totally confused, I thought the map must be wrong or something, because I had this idea so entrenched in my head.
All, I can say is: Where were all the world maps in elementary school!?!?!?!?!

When i was younger and lived in england my
dad told me that people flew around different parts of america, for some reason i imagined that everyone in america had a odd colored house and had a ariplane in there drive away.

When I was younger I knew about racism here in America, and I thought that it worked in reverse in Africa - like if I was a white person born over there, the black people would look down on me and treat me badly. It only seems fair, really. Of course, I also thought they didn't have cities over there, just tribes of people on the savannah. I hope they educate children better these days.

As a child, after I found out that "urine" is the "proper" word for pee, but before anyone had told me how to spell it, I was studying maps. I looked at maps of various places, including the great lakes region. When I first saw Lake Huron on a map, I thought h-u-r-o-n might be the way to spell that new word, urine, that I'd recently learned, so I really wondered about Lake Huron. I was well learned enough by then to think it extremely unlikely that there was literally a giant lake of pee there between Michigan and Ontario. But I thought the lake must have been named derogatorily by someone who perceived something inpure or unaesthetic about its waters. Even though this was a confusion on my part, it might have just given me a head start for later being aware of water pollution!

when I was about 8, me and my friends believed we could dig a hole to China, or at least South Africa (dont ask why South Africa, I really dont know)so we would spent all of our time at lunch trying to dig a hole to escape the school yard to go to China and everyday, we would start a new hole because our hole got covered up. hey, it helped pass the time.

I used to believe…

im from new zealand and n.z is pretty much just two large islands (north island & south island) i lived in the north island, when i was about 5-6 i thought that jesus lived in the south island with the queen.... i didint relise that the world is some-what larger than n.z

I used to live in Canada, so I never really learned about American states until I actually moved there around the time I was 10. I thought that Washington DC was a state and that Virginia and Maryland were just cities in it.

When I was a child, i used to believe that i could see to the Magician Kings, on a terrace behind my house

I used to believe…

being an american, i didn't know too much about britian and it's three seperate countries in one country thing. i assumed that all of britian was called england, and i also assumed anyone who called the ocuntry Britian was wrong or weird. i would always correct people who talked about british things and say, "no, it's english!!" So one day in school, when the teacher referred to britian on a map and explained the countries thing, i told her it was all england. i eventually got in a bit of trouble for talking back. go figure.

I used to belive that the world was a box and when people say your going to fall off the edge i stand still for hours.

I moved here from New York, and on our way down to North Carolina, my parents thought it would be funny to scare us. My mom told us that NC didn't have ketchup and they had blue milk. At the age of 8 that was almost like the end of the world.

When I was young we lived in a town that was connected to a larger town by crossing a bridge across the river. We could see only the top of this bridge from our home and I used to be afraid to drive to the next town because I thought we had to drive across the top of bridge to get there and I was afraid we would fall through to the river.

When I was about 7, I was told we were moving to Hawaii. I envisioned us living in grass huts with one room, no roads and worst of all ~gasp~ no TV! I was terribly upset. I still live here today...

My brother once told me that the world would become so polluted that one day it would explode.
Shortly afterwards I overheard a news report on the television about NASA revealing more "evidence in support of the Big Bang Theory".
For several days I was absolutely terrified.

When I was 6 or 7, my dad was temporarily relocated to Austin, Texas. (We lived in Dallas at the time.) He would commute back and forth on weekends, but one day, my mom, brother and I actually drove down to with him to spend the week. I was so excited to be going--I had never been "out of town" in my memory--so I was repeatedly asking my dad, "Daddy, what's Austin like?" He couldn't communicate to me that it was just another city, and I was relentless in my asking. So, to give me a ridiculous answer that I would laugh at and maybe give up on asking him, he told me, "In Austin, there are lots of wild animals. And everyone eats nothing but breakfast cereal." I was shocked. "Really?" I asked. He thought it was so funny that I actually believed him that he told me all about it, and how everyone's favorite meal is a really cool breakfast cereal thing called fruit soup. When we passed a deer crossing sign, I knew that had to mean that it was true: there WERE wild animals in Austin. I was so disappointed when we got there and there were no wild animals and we ate plain old hamburgers!

Ok, this one is about my brother.

Years ago, my family went up to Maine. Over there, we were go suppossed to go on a cruise to Canada. Unfortunately, there was a storm and we couldn't go.

My brother came to a conclusion that Canada was an island! I had to prove it to him, when he was 11, that Canada is connected to the US!