the world

My Mum couldn't understand why I kept crying everytime she mentioned going on holiday until I told her that I didn't want to live in a pipe. I had seen refugees on TV sheltering from a flood in huge concrete pipes and believed they were in Wales, where we were going on holiday.

Charlotte

I used to believe that for on this side of the world, three leaf clovers were common, and four leaf clovers were lucky. But on the OTHER side of the world it was the opposite. Lots of four leaf clovers and not so many lucky three leaf clovers. I used to dream about going to the "other side of the world" and picking enough four leaf clovers to last a lifetime, and bringing them back to this side of the world so they'd be lucky.

Wish I was a leprechaun

When I was 3-4 years old, my grandmother went on a trip to Scotland. We, as a family went to the airport to drop her off. We watched her sit down in the departures lounge, on the other side of the baggage check. I remember thnking to myself "Scotland" didn't look like a very fun place.

Poor mislead fool

i believed that england was a medieval country without cars and telephones. the reason was that i watched the silver jubilee of queen elizabeth II. on the telly in 1977 and there were only horses and old uniforms. the announcer was also referring to queen elizabeth I. who had lived in the middle ages. logically, number one is mother of number two - how exactly elizabeth II. could ever manage to live from 14hundredsomething til this day i couldn't sort out but it was amazing to know that there was a medieval country still in existance.
i also thought that latin america had to do with ancient rome and people would walk around in togas, live in colosseum- and temple-like buildings and speak latin

german geographer

When I was a little girl, I made a point of memorizing each country's flag so that if I was ever kidnapped and ended up in a strange place, I'd know where I was.

texasbabe

I used to believe that Florida was really heaven becuase we would fly through the clouds to get there and it was filled with many old people, including my grandparents.

Jason

At about age 7 I thought one could see the people running around on a map, if one looked hard enough.

Adam Smith

I used to look at a map of the world and think that it was only half of the world, and that when I flipped over the map, the other half of the world should be there. I would demand "but where is the other half of the world?" and become very distressed that grownups apparently weren't alarmed that half of the world was missing, which made me think that they were being brainwashed and I was the only one who knew that some greater power was trying to hoodwink us, or else the other half of the world didn't show up on the map because it wasn't discovered yet. I swore to become an explorer and find the other half of the world when I grew up. And yup -- I love traveling the world, though I know all the major landmasses are where they are supposed to be.

moon grocer

I used to think I could go to a country like Australia, see what the winning lottery numbers were, then fly back to Ireland in time to play those numbers anf become a millionaire. It didn't help that my aunt encouraged this belief.

Clare, Ireland

As a child, after I found out that "urine" is the "proper" word for pee, but before anyone had told me how to spell it, I was studying maps. I looked at maps of various places, including the great lakes region. When I first saw Lake Huron on a map, I thought h-u-r-o-n might be the way to spell that new word, urine, that I'd recently learned, so I really wondered about Lake Huron. I was well learned enough by then to think it extremely unlikely that there was literally a giant lake of pee there between Michigan and Ontario. But I thought the lake must have been named derogatorily by someone who perceived something inpure or unaesthetic about its waters. Even though this was a confusion on my part, it might have just given me a head start for later being aware of water pollution!

Janice