the world: places

I used to believe that every nation in the world were states of U.S.A. . Sometimes I still do.

I used to believe that the maps for the United States and Texas were identical.

For the longest time, I used to believe Russia and Germany were the same country. I would often get them confused when watching a WW2 film or a James Bond movie. The both talked with funny accents and seemed evil.

Blame the media.

I used to believe that all the pencils in the world were made in Pennsylvania. I asked my teacher that once and she laughed at me.

I used to believe that the black lines that divide states were actualy on the earth. We used to drive from Missouri to Maryland and I'd always watch for the lines, but because I never saw them (duh) I thought Missouri was just HUGE.

I figured it out when I was 8

I used to believe that if someone lived "overseas", it just meant that they lived by the ocean.

I used to think there was a difference between "the whole world" and "the whole wide world" -- the latter being, of course, wider. My cousins had a globe in their house which I understood to be a picture of "the whole world". I figured "the whole wide world" must look like the globe with a kind of small house or cabin attached to it at about the equator.

I always thought the United States was one big state, since I was confused by the name. I wasn't sure what the rest of the small sections were called.

This isn't my own childhood belief, but a good friend of mine's. For some strange reason he developped this belief that if you flew to Australia then the plane turned upside-down, and this would somehow mean that when you got there that gravity would be inverted. He firmly believes that all Australians have to wear magnetic shoes so that they don't fall off the earth, and that some sort of special cling film keeps the sea in place. This friend is now 25 and still firmly believes this, and no matter how much we try and find holes in his theory, he manages to invent a way aorund it.

I used to believe that picadilly circus was like a giant circus in the centre of london.

I thought that you could see the Great Wall of China in space because it was so tall it broke through the Earth's atmostphere

After looking at a world map which had Mercator cylindrical projection (the type of maps where the lines of longitude are parallel with each other) in one of my early years in school, I thought that Greenland was more than twice the size as Australia because Greenland is at a high latitude and has been severely stretched out (Australia is actually about three and a half times the size of Greenland). It took me a long time to realise that on those kinds of maps, the distance between the lines of longitude decreases with latitude.

I used to believe every country was its own island (I live in Australia) and just could not understand how that many of them could fit onto the world

I used to believe that the airport control towers were great big fishtanks. This is because the one in Washington, D. C. (my nearby airport's control tower) had green glass surrounding it.

Untill I was about 9 I believed that the state that I was living in was in the middle of the ocean and that we were the only state with schools, cars, buildings, roads, etc.

When my mom told me people from poland were called poles, i thought they were literal poles.