the world: places

When I was about 4 or 5 my mom told we were going to visit my aunts and uncles that lived in Wales. I pictured them all living inside the stomaches of actual whales. I was very confused when we arrived at a normal house instead.

once when i was about 6 or 7, my class went on a field trip to the playground. i was in the sandbox, set on digging a hole to china. one of my classmates joined me, and as we sat across from each other, our separate holes connected and a caught a glimpse of his hand. for the longest time i beleived that i had actually dug all the way to china and that there was another kid in china who had dug a hole to california!

i used to believe that at Picadilly Circus, there was actually a circus. i persuaded my mum to take me there when I was five, and i was so upset that the circus was not there, i refused to speak to my mum for a week, cos i was convinced that she had told the circus to go away.

I used to think that there was a place called "Random". This was the place where all the winners of competitons were decided. Id always hear that the winner would be chosen at random but only figured it out when I was about 10

I used to believe that instead of being loads of postmen, there was only one an he had to travel the world every day to give everyone their mail.

I used to believe the Tropic of Cancer was a part of the world where lots of people got cancer. I assumed skin cancer must be especially common there, since I could see on the globe that it ran through the Carribean where it's so sunny.
I always felt really lucky that I didn't live in that part of the world.

When I was 6 I went to an exhibition with my friend Nicholas and we saw a map on the wall and neither of us could read all of the words, and for years after I thought Egypt was pronounced Eggyput.

On the first day back at school after the summer break, my cousin was asked where he had been on holiday. "Chicken" he answered. He meant Turkey.

I used to believe…

last week on a train i had a conversation with one of my best friends only to discover that at 18years old she still thought that timbuktoo was imaginary yet gotham city where batman lived was real!!

I thought Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomenon. It made sense to me that we'd elected those guys because we saw their faces on the side of a mountain. When I learned it was man-made, I wondered what was so great about it.

when i first learnt that the world was shaped like a ball i thought that all the people in austraila must have little suction pads that grow on their feet to stop them falling off i was terrified when my uncle moved there because, being born in england, he didn't have suction feet and would obviously fall to his doom as soom as he got off the plane

We rarely went to the beach when I was small. Being by the ocean, I was afraid, that at any time, pirates in an old Spanish type galleon would sail by and harrass the beach goers.

When I was little I had a very short attention span (still do, actually) and when we were going somewhere a few miles away in the car, I'd start asking where we were going even though I'd been told a few minutes ago. Just to shut me up my parents would tell me we were going to Texas. For years I didn't believe Texas was a real place. My parents told me the truth when I got in an argument with my Kiddie Gymnastics instructor because she'd said she was going to visit her relatives in Texas and I knew there was no such place.

Me and my sister used to dig holes in the yard because we thought we could dig to china.

I used to believe that if you touched a map, you would actually touch that place in the world--there would just be this huge finger descending from the sky, and you might kill people! So I never touched anyplace on a map until I was 8!

I live in Scotland, on the mouth of the River Fourth, and for years I thought that Edinburgh (on the other side of the river) was the rest of Europe because my parents used to say that Germany was just across the water.