the world: places

I used to believe…

up until i was about seven, i could not grasp the concept that their really werent physical dividers between the states, like their were on most maps of the US used for weather.

when i was seven, my family went on the first road trip, and i was severely dissapointed when i found out "crossing the state border" only amounted to viewing a "welcome to" sign

For the longest time I thought that the entire world was living in the past while the United States was the only country in the present. Ex: I thought that anyone from Africa lived in a hut and if you were from China you lived like Mulan. When an African foreign exchange student came to live with us I asked her if she had ever been chased by a lion. Bewildered, she said no. Then I wanted to know if they took field trips to the Savannah. No, they didn't. Finally I tried showing her how appliances work, thinking she'd be amazed by electricty, turns out she had all of those things too! I was sooo confused. It took a long time for me to realize that people from different countries live in houses just like ours. lol

I never knew that people actually lived in Las Vegas. I always thought everybody would just go there on vacation, LOL!
Now I'm married to a Las Vegas native and we contemplate moving there.

When I was in first grade, my teacher taught us about the equator. She explained that it was an invisible line circling the earth. However, she had quite a thick southern accent. I thought she said there's an invisible lion (yes, the animal) circling the earth. I even raised my hand and asked her again! For quite a while I believed that there was an invisible lion running around and around the earth. Too funny!

When i was young (in fact up until i was about 22 when i actually had the guts to try it out) my mum used to say tht if you didn't step off escalators in time it would suck you under the moving stars forever. Even now when i look at escalators i intentially stand on unitl i hit the edge - just because i can!

When I was but a small boy, I heard the name of a place called "paradise." I really thought it was an actual place that you could visit. Where was it? Well naturally, I figured it was just north of Paris. My father explained to me that it's just an imaginary place. And then I wondered, why there were so many people wanting to visit this one imaginary place when you can't ever go there? My father couldn't quite explain it to me. It was just a few years later when it finally dawned on me what it really meant. LOL.

i used to believe Amster dam was a dam made out of hamsters

There's a city in California called Lompoc.I thought it was pronounced lawn-poke.when I was 7 we went on a car trip and stopped in lompoc for lunch.As chance would have it we drove bya lawn that was being airated(sp?) You know when they punch holes and there are little plugs of turf lying around. I saw it and thought ,"aha! Thats why its called Lawn-poke!" It made plenty of sense.When I told my mom she cracked up and I couldn't figure oht what was so funny.what a coincidence!

My mum told my older brother that dogs weren't allowed in London.

when I was about 7, I saw a picture of the Great Wall of China taken from a satelite so that the whole wall could be seen.... When my mom pointed it out and asked if I knew what it was I rsponded "waterslide, big deal"

When I was little in the 70's the issue of Quebec Separatism was big in the news. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how all those french people were going to physically separate their province from the rest of canada. Then I figured they were probably all just going to move to France. Much easier!

I used to believe until a couple of months ago that Bulgaria was a fictional country, because that was where the horrible king and queen lived in the film 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'.

When I was five or six, we moved to Devon from Manchester, and to make it more appealing, my father told me it never rained in Devon and that ice-cream was free. When we were packing I told my mother to leave my coats as I wouldn't need them. I was so cute then.

As a child I enjoyed watching a tape of an educational special on dinosaurs. One line in the show went, "Dinosaur bones have been discovered in every continent except Antarctica." I asked my parents what "Antarctica" meant, and they (who must have misunderstood me, since I can't imagine them telling me this on purpose) said that it meant a place where there were many houses and buildings. Even years later, when I knew what the continent of Antarctica was, I still had this image of houses and buildings whenever I watched the tape and heard that line.

I used to believe that traveling in cognito was a place in Africa or somewhere.

I grew up learning that Alaska and Hawaii were the two newest US ststes, both becoming states in 1959. I never had any trouble realizing that they were real places before they became states. That might have something to do with the fact that they are disconnected form the rest of the US. Later, I learned that before Alaska and Hawaii, New Mexico and Arizona had been the newest states, becoming states in 1912. Then, I somehow envisioned, for quite some time, that before 1912 there had been a giant bottomless hole in the Earth where New Mexico and Arizona were later to come into existence as states.