the world: places

In early 1990, our school was one of the first from the West to visit the former GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having grown up to fear the horrors of communism, we fully believed that everyone in the GDR must be starving and miserable, and when our minibus approached Halle, we were all terrified because we thought we'd be staying in these tiny little sheds, crammed up close together, with miniscule plots of land in front of them, where they were growing cabbages because there was nothing else to eat. It was only when we reached the city centre that we discovered that these were people's gardening allotments and that everyone lived in normal flats with electricity, hot water, toilets and shop-bought food, and had done for the past few decades.

I was a small child during the twilight of the Soviet Union, and once the country Georgia (then a part of it) was mentioned on the nightly news. I started freaking out, thinking the Communists had invaded Atlanta. I was really worried that the Soviet Union would expand to Florida and the Carolinas and eventually to my house. My mother had to explain the difference between Georgia the country in Europe and Georgia the state by Florida.

i used to believe that behind the trees across the railway line (about 15 metres away)was sheffield, it's actually about half a country away, and that the end of my road led to nowhere. naturally, i don't do so great in geography these days.

I used to think that Ohio(the state I was born and still live in)Was the only place on Earth, then I got a puzzle of the United States, and thought the U.S. was the only place on Earth.

I moved to Texas when I was 10, and I had just seen "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" where he has to go to the basement of the Alamo to find his bike. I was super bummed when I went to the Alamo, and it looked nothing like the movie.

I used to believe that if you kept driving in the direction of a beautiful pink sunset, you would get to my parents homeleand of Lebanon. Once on a trip my dad pointed to the very beautiful sunset up ahead and said something like it reminds him of Lebanon. I thought he said it IS Lebanon. I like the magical-ness of it, still do:)

I live in Denmark and if we talk about Greenland, we say "up on Greenland". So, naturally, for years I thought that Greenland was placed floating in the sky. Who knew...

I used to think that there were three Americas: South America, America, and North America which were all floating in the sky. I knew I lived in America, so I thought South America was a giant chunk of land floating under us and North America was a giant chunk of land floating over us. That was why when we went somewhere that wasn't in America we had to get in a plane and fly into the sky.

When was younger, there were 2 things I knew for sure, I knew it snowed in Germany and that clouds look like snow (I'd never been to the snow before.) So when our family friends moved to Germany, I used to look up at the clouds and think of them staring back down from the edges of them.

When I was a child I always thought Canada was apart of the US... not its own country!!

I used to be scared of travelling. Since I live in Canada I thought you were safe. But I was terrified to go to Antartica. Why? I thought you would fall off since it was at the bottom of the globe. And that you would keep falling down in space.

When I was younger, we had a giant satellite photograph of the British Isles hanging in our hallway. There was a small strip of land at the bottom of the photograph (northern France and northen Belgium). One day, I asked my mother what country that bit of land was, and she told me it was France. For years afterwards, I believed that France was a long, thin country, covering pretty much all the coast on the other side of the English channel, and that it was part of the British Isles.

I used to believe…

That the District of Columbia was an island in the Carribean. I believed this until I was about 19 yrs old.

i used to believe that Afghanistan was in-between Wisconsin and Minnesota. I always wondered why we were sending troops to our own country...

I have family in several different states, and when I was little, every time someone would talk about these family members, I imagined that they lived crowded together in a long, white hallway, because obviously Ohio was the only state where people had houses and such.

I used to think the southern half of the United States was warm all the time and the northern half was cold all the time (I live in southern California). Then I went to New York City in the summer...