the world: places

Until last year when I was 13 I never bothered to think out how a map worked, in relation to the round earth. I thought that if you went north from here (Canada) and you went past the Arctic you would be in Antarctica!

I took a little boy to Luray Caverns, Virginia, an underground cave system. It was much cooler in the caverns than it was outside, the little boy was surprised that it wasn't hotter since we were closer to the earth's molten hot core underground.

I don't remember much about when I was a kid. But the one thing I do remember is; that I could walk from my house to anywhere I had ever been in relatively a short time. I tried to prove this and got lost.

While growing up in upstate New York, whenever my sister and I would be fighting or causing a ruckus, my mother would often say, "You kids are making me crazy! You're going to drive me to Poughkeepsie!" (Referring to a large Mental Hospital that used to be in that city.) Not knowing anything about the hospital, I used to think that Poughkeepsie was a city over-run with insane mommies that had been dropped off in the streets by their children. I still laugh when I get this image in my head.

As kids, when we used to ask ourdad where we would be going on our summer holidays, he would say "Ourgate" We believed that "Ourgate" was a place, in fact it was our garden gate - meaning we wern't having a holiday at all!

when i was about 4 or 5 i ALWAYS thought that the world was just my little town callled stone. i believed this for years untill i learnt otherwise.

I used to think that in every country there was an exact copy of you but they spoke another language…… I used to think that my copy person would get washed up on a beach and id be able to talk to her ;)

My dad used to tell me that there was always, (come rain or shine) a loan piper standing at Scotch Corner. And he'd played the pipes to tell you you'd got as far as Scotland. And this was true because my dad said so!

When I was about 6 I used to believe that, when the berlin wall came down, that there was a wall seperating west virginia from (east) virginia because they had been in a civil war.

When I was a kid, I thought the words on maps existed in the real world--for example, in the United States, the words UNITED STATES were actually carved into the ground. (A giant "U" in California, an "N" in Nevada, and so forth...)

When I was quite young I got really interested in studying my dad's Atlas. I thought that the British Isles were Australia & New Zeland because they were the shape of a kangaroo and a koala bear.

I believed for a long time that the world was the shape of Great Britain and that all the other places I'd heard about were somewhere in Great Britain. I blame the BBC weather map for this :o)

I used to believe that if a town or city were 'twinned', they would be identical, ie if I went to the French town twinned with my home town it would have the same layout - streets, shops, etc!!!!

Because we used to get TV programmes and Text books from the US, my friend thought that by driving north of the North Island of NZ you would end up in America.

After amny years of hearing you can dig a whole to China. I thought that all countries were on top of each other.
China, New Zealand, Australia, America and so on and that the planes flew straight up. And of course I thought it was all flat......

I used to belive that Switzerland was at the centre of the world, (because it had the highest moutains, of course!), that all the countries were packed around it, with England on the edge, which of course led to the Atlantic Ocean - the biggest ocean in the world!