landscape

i used to believe that other countries were in the sky 'couse grown ups pointed at the see whene i asked and there was nothing else there but skies.
i remember being disappointed finding out that other countries were like mine, on the ground....

purple blood

When i was younger i used to dig holes when my family and I went to the beach. My family told me that if i dug a hole deep enough, i would reach China. So i used to dig really deep holes because i wanted to go to China.

David

From what I was taught at school, I got a fairly clear (I thought) picture of how the earth was laid out: first there was a thin layer of grass, about an inch thick. Then there was the dirt - about half a meter of it, with stones in. Then there was a layer of dinosaur bones, for about another half a meter, and then there was all the hot metal in the centre of the earth. I always drew my pictures with this in cross-section.

Pepper

When I was about four, I thought that each country was a separate planet and that they were connected by long strips of water. When I drew a picture showing this, my mother disabused me.

George from Seattle

I think I was in first or second grade when a teacher first mentioned the idea of continental shifts, and the concept made me depressed, sad and scared.

I used to believe that someone from my family could easily get stuck on another continent, South America let's say, just as it drifted away from us on North America. I would then be separated from my brother or sister, whoever the unlucky person was to be, and never see them again. I used to get sad thinking about how much I would miss them.

Matt

I believed that everything on the other side of the earth was upside down and that if I ever visited I would fall because no one taught me how live the other way.

Jennifer

When I was about six or seven my friend Cristy and I used to build these giant sand castles in the sandbox. We would each get on one side then dig through until our hands touched. We believed that if we dug down from there we could get to the other side of the world.

Laura

I grew up surrounded by canefields in South Florida, near Lake Okeechobee. I thought the whole world was one cane field after another.

Pahokee

Growing up in Roswell, NM I used to believe that the mountains were purple because all I ever saw of mountains was El Capitan and that was the way it appeared. Imagine my surprise when we finally visited the mountains and I found out that they were dirt, trees and rocks just like the plains I grew up on.

Mary

On being told that earth was round, and gravity holds everything down to the earth, I somehow thought that we were inside the "hollow" ball, and if we flew upwords we would reach Australia.

Moi

i used to believe that the world consisted of a flat bit of ground, with a few different coloured layers beneath it, with my street and all the houses lined up on that dirt, and the sky above. I must have been 3 or 4.

Tom

As a kid, I used to think that we lived inside the Earth, rather than on the surface (before I knew about the atmosphere, gravity, etc). I've recently learned that there's a theory devoted to this preposterous notion called 'The Inner Earth Theory'.

E

My sister used to believe that different parts of the world were god's body - eg Italy was his shoe and New Zealand (where we lived) was his finger. On top of that, the white row of bricks down the street from us were his teeth.

dacote

I used to think that when the sun went down, it went underground and it would create volcanoes while under there. Then it would come out of the ground the next day.

Stephen

I used to believe that over the crown of each hill the seaside would appear before my eyes.
I still get a tingle in the tummy whenever I come to crown in the hill today, whether I'n near the coast or in the middle of the Pyrenees!

Steve

I was told that hills were just the graves of giants who used to roam the earth. Apparently they just fell down and died one day. Hence the hills.

Mhairi

that hills were giants buried underground...

tracy g

A girl I was in school with believed that hills were created by the footsteps of dinosaurs, and mountains were the paths they used over and over again!

Jeremy