places

When I was growing up San Francisco was the only city I had ever seen so I thought that all cities had hills. I was sure that in order to be a city it would have to have hills - boy was Los Angeles a surprise for me!

kathy sylvester

when i was a kid i loved the cartoon "beetlejuice" (a spin off from the movie) and i heard about a country called the Netherlands and i was incredulous.

i was like "wait, the netherworld (the world beetlejuice and all dead people lived in) is a REAL PLACE?!?!?!?"

from then on, i believed that the netherworld was a actual place you could visit in the real world

dib

When i was little i have no clue of what age..okay i live in mississippi in north america and i thought that mississippi was like a country and north america was a planet.. i have no clue how i came up with this idea.. and then i figured out north america wasnt one of the 9 planets!!

Pennie

I used to hear on TV all the time about "paradise" and think it was the name of an actual island somewhere, that looked just like Hawaii or something.

Brandon Campbell

i used to believe that the mainland(i lived on the isle of wight) was all made of concrete and there were no trees or grass there but lots and lots of cars and people.

miranda

As a child, I once had a conversation with a friend of mine who told me that he and his family were moving to LA. I nodded and pretended to know what he was talking about. It wasn't until years later that I came to realize that LA and Los Angeles were the same thing. I used to think LA was spelled Ellay, a different city and not an acronym for Los Angeles.

Paulie

When I was little, I used to believe that the clouds in the sky was the North Pole, and that was where Santa Claus lived. I also believed that the nearby industrial area was Sydney (I live in Melbourne). I was a bit disorientated when my parents announced we were actually going to Sydney!

Anon

When I was 5 years old and living in Texas, my mom and I flew to Michigan to visit family on a regular basis. I had trouble with the terms "north" and "up there".
At the time I thought that to get to Michigan, the airplane had to fly straight up, like a super elevator taking us to a floor way up on a high rise. I spent some time trying to figure out how far away Michigan really was if each state had it's own layer. I'm now a social studies teacher and have to giggle when I think about my early impressions of US geography.

Christi

I once had a friend who, presumably because there are so many American movies on TV, seemed convinced that everything he saw on TV was in America. There was a rugby match on one day, and he said "That rugby's coming from Scotland. Scotland's in America". To which his Dad answered "Everything's in America as far as he's concerned".

Alan, Sheffield, UK

Once my father had to go to Seattle and my sister want to go as well so she ask him, "Is attle nice?" They thought that was someone's name!!!

Anon

i used to believe that every country was a different planet!

bianca

I used to think that you had to fly on a rocket to get to disney land. I thought this because i believed that other countries were in fact other planets, You'd have to travel across space to get there! I really wanted to go to disney land but never though i could because it was too unsafe and Mum didn't like me doing unsafe things!
Imagine my relief when i discovered that there was only one planet that I needed to travel around

Stephen

I lived on the east coast of the US. When I was watching westerns at the movies, I thought the time frame of the story was contempory. I thought if you went "out West", there would be horses, wagons and no automobles and everyone lived like that as in the western movies.

Anon

Once when I was little, we took a road trip to Ohio (the next state over). I kept asking "Are we there yet?" She told me I would know when we were there, because the grass would be purple. I was VERY disapointed when we got there...

Jessica

Until maybe 8th grade, I didn't know Alaska was attatched to Canada. And neither did my mom, I was looking at a map in my history book, and when she looked at the map, she said "Wait, Alaska's connected to Canada!?"

Stephanie

i used to think the state border was a big wall round the area that you had to climb over to get to the next place

sexy sasha

I used to beleive the U.S. was a boy because florida looked like a... you know...

Micah

growing up in california, as a small child i thought the whole world was just california...with sections of different countries.

Anon

When I was younger, I believed that the maps I saw in school were only half of the Earth, and that other schools had the other side of the world. Then I asked my mom why I only had to study one side of the map for my test, then I was informed that that was the whole thing. I was kind of upset that that was it, I had always imagined of great places on the other side.

Anon

I live in the United States, and when I was four I didn't know where that was on a map. I got a little toy globe that showed the names of all the continents but not the countries. I knew I lived in "America", but on the globe I saw North America and South America and I didn't know which one I lived in. I decided South America was cooler because it had the Amazon Rainforest, so I chose to think I lived there, but was corrected by my parents soon after.

Anon