the world: places

When I was 9 we moved from Utah to California. I truly thought we were moving to a foreign country. Our first weekend there we went to San Francisco and saw all the "flower children" on the street corners and I knew for sure it was another country.

I grew up in Hawaii, and was pretty sure that our country, the United States, was the fiftieth state

When I was four years old, my parents took a vacation to the Grand Canyon. From their description, I invisioned it to be an inky black hole in the middle of a motel parking lot. A few years later when I was old enough, we traveled there. Imagine my surprise when I saw that big hole in the ground for myself.

When I was 5, we drove from California to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents. My parents must've shown me where we were going on a map, and I saw that the land ended near there, because I assumed that when we got there, the land would just drop off right after their house. I remember looking down the street to see where the end was when we got there.

when I was about 3, I had just learned to read and I found an ashtray that said "Costa Rica" on it. I told everyone that "Costa Rica" was Spanish for "Puerto Rico". Dunno how I made that connection...

When I first learned about George Washington crossing the Delaware, I thought that "delaware" was a word for a body of water somewhat bigger than a stream, but smaller than a river.

In Hong Kong there's a Catholic secondary school called Mary Knoll College which has lovely red-brick neo-classical buildings, and to my young eyes that style of architecture exemplify the American landscape that I sometimes saw on travel programmes on TV.

So when one day my family drove by that college in a car and I saw those majestic red brick buildings whizzing by (there was also a white steepled church as well) I couldn't believe it and asked out loud, 'Have we driven to America already?'

I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada where a lot of places are named in Native Canadian (ie, tatamagouche, etc) and we used to drive by a place called Musquodobit Harbour on our way to Clam Harbour beach. I always thought it was called Mosquito Bite Harbour and thought I would never like to go there!!

My father took me on a bus past Blackwall Tunnel - a Victorian road tunnel under the river Thames with an imposing building above the entrance. "See that" he said "that takes people all the way under the river" For a long time I thought that the windows and doors were closed and the whole building slid down under the river, like some kind of submarine ferryboat.

During my first years at school we had an outline map of the world on our classroom wall. I often wondered why someone had written the word 'and' in the bottom right corner near Australia. Years later I realised that this was New Zealand.

I used to believe that all countries could only be countries if they were islands.i live in England, so grew up thinking that.so when i saw a map and things i didn't understand how somewhere could be a country if there were other places around it.So you can imagine me getting confused when i thought the whole of Europe was an entire country.

when I was about 10 I used to sit in Benhill Rec, a park in Sutton, surrey. In the distance I could see what I believed to be the eiffel tower. It wasn't till a few years later I realised it was a electricity pylon in Croydon

i used to believe that hawaii was located right south of florida. hey, they both have great weather!

when I was about 5 my Dad went to a conferance in Basingstoke. when he came home he gave me a pair of chopsticks from a restaurant he'd been to. For a very long time afterwards I thought Basingstoke was in China

When I was younger my grndad used to take me to villages outside canterbury on sundays after tea for an ice cream and a bottle of stella. He would tell me that we had left England and had gone to russia...I believed it...maybe I was drunk????

Until very recently (I am 13), I thought "Islam" was a country - apologies to any Muslims reading this. I guess I got it confused with Iran. For those that don't know, Islam is a religion.