places

I used to believe that the forth bridge , which runs across the river forth in Scotland, was named because the other three had fallen down !

ross

I live in Australia and my cousin who is the same age as me lives in Poland. From a very young age i grasped the concept that when it was day here it was night in Poland and vice-versa. In my mind however i believed that our lives worked in perfect unison but in reverse. For example, as i got out of bed, she got into bed. when i ate breakfast, she ate dinner. when i went to school she came home from school etc. The whole idea overwhelmed me but at the same time I remember it gave me a strong feeling of connection to my cousin.

Joanna

I used to believe that Europe was made up of six separate countries: France, Paris, London, Venice, Switzerland, and Brittany. I have a map that I drew in third grade to prove it.

Emily

I sincerely believed that Mexico and Texaco were two states next to each other somewhere "down south".
After seeing an atlas of the US in my granddad's car, I spent my car trips with my nose pressed against the window, desperately watching to see the enormous "IOWA" that must have been painted on someone's field. I could never fully explain to anyone what I meant when I asked them if they'd seen "the BIG IOWA" yet.
Amazingly enough, I am allowed to mingle in the general population.

Tiff-tiff the terrible

Once when I was vacationing with my parents in England, they suggested we go to see Greenwich Mean Time. I protested tremendously because I didn't want to go to a place where people were mean to each other. Instead I requested we go to Greenwich Nice Time. Naturally, we stayed entirely away from Greenwich.

Douglas

When I was younger (don't want to mention exact age out of embarassment), I believed that we lived INSIDE the world. My point of revelation came when I was reading about the Great Flood in the Bible. I told my mom it didn't make sense because Noah and his family would have drowned when the water reached the top. She realized she had a lot of explaining to do!

Marianne

I used to believe that each country is on its own Earth. Therefore there were more than one Earths. And to travel internationally meant planet-hopping from one Earth to the other.

Anna Lim

i used to think that alaska was an island, since it was always inserted at the bottom left on every map of the usa...

jen

I was babysitting this girl and her sister, they asked me about the places I have visited. Well I mentioned that I had been to Chicago. The girl looks at me in disgust, and says, "I will never go to Chicago! THEY EAT MONKEYS THERE!"

One of the most hilarious things I have heard from a kid, I really would love to know how she came upon that wonderful notion!

Stephanie

when I was little I loved digging deep holes in the sand at my cottage. My Grandpa used to say "you are going to find China soon". I always pictured that I was going to come accross dinnerware (china plates and cups!) buried in the sand... I never thought he meant I would find China, the country! :)

ts

I used to believe all countries besides the USA were 3rd world countries. When I was 10 years old I'd talk to people from Britain and Canada online and wonder how they had access to the internet.

Tegan

I'm a military kid, and when I was little, about 6 years old, my dad was going on tour to Yugoslavia. I didn't know where that was, so I asked him, and he said it was north of some other country. I didn't understand "north", or "south" etc. So I looked up into the sky, and asked, "How do you get up there? Is there a road that goes up there?" thinking you had to drive to the sky. He didn't see me looking into the sky, so he said, "yeah, there's a road that goes up there" as if it was a stupid question, lol. Thankfully, I do understand geography now.

Anon

When I was still in elementary school, there was this big (permanent) chalk drawing of the United States on the pavement near the playground.

During recess when I was in the 1st and 2nd grade, I repeatedly jumped on the drawing. I believed that if I stepped on our state, a giant foot would fly down from the sky and squash everybody on the playground. I was so confused when it didn't happen. Haha.

kirchie

When I was younger my dad was in the military and we were stationed in Germany. I knew I was born in the USA and we used to live there, and my parents would talk about living back in the states. Having no understanding of geography, I always thought the moon was the other half of the earth, the half with the United States and airplanes took you back and forth.

Anon

My daughter Stella, who is 10 years old, just told me that when she was younger she thought that asking for country's capital city name was equivalent to asking for the country "pet name". That is certainly because - to a kid - the word "Brasilia" sounds like a "pet name" to the word "Brazil" and not the actual name of our capital city. In Brazil we also have a state called "Goiás" whose capital is "Goiânia", another "pet name" in her mind. And then, the funniest of all, was that she then concluded that France's capital would be "Francine".

Nino

When I was three my family moved to a place called Black Rabbits. I looked all over the place for those rabbits but I never saw them.

Finally I said something about it in front of my parents and they laughed, and we drove down the lake to the place where the RAPIDS were, and they pointed out the sign that said Black Rapids. (Yes, I could read when I was three.) They explained that rapids were a place where the water in the lake moves fast through a narrow spot, and I got the idea.

Still, for at least a little while, whenever we drove past or boated through the rapids I would imagine that I could see the rabbits swimming in the choppy water.

Brenda

I really wasn't looking forward to my first ever school field trip because I though we would literally just visit a field.

Kim

When I was naughty as a kid, my dad would threaten to send me away to live with a Mrs Griggs, who lived in Ipswich. She was a nasty, mean, child-hating old spinster, who would make me eat things I didn't like and keep me locked in a cupboard. If I was misbehaving, my dad just needed to say the words "Mrs Griggs!" or "Ipswich!", and I would become panic-stricken. Even though I later found out there was no such person, I had an irrational fear of Ipswich for a long time.

Lucy

When I was a child, I used to think that separating Quebec from Canada involved actual physical separation. Needless to say, I was puzzled as to how this would be accomplished. I thought someone would actually saw along the borders.

Nicolas

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.

LaughNSing