places

I used to believe that only old, retired people like my grandparents lived in Florida. I was very surprised to find out they had schools there.

me again

I thought the borders were determined by a big red rope, that had been there since the beginning of time. I thought passports broke the rope, and when you had walked into the new country, the rope was magically fixed again!

x-nicola-x

When I was about 4 or so years old and my parents took me to the beach, my mom told me that if you dig under the sand really deep you can reach China. So I believed that China was underneath all beaches and if you dug really deep you'd be on top of China and could reach it.

Mamochan

iused to believe that the leaning tower of the pisa was called the leaning tower of pizza!! i believed this until yesterday (24/8/06)

Anon

Like a fellow contributor i also believed that the Elgin Marbles were big and round , but worse still at the age of 36 we travelled to Scotland on Holiday in our camper van. We went to the small town of Elgin, an then i wandered around trying to find where these famous marbles were housed. Eventually the woman at Tourist information informed me that they were in LONDON

Not this time

Growing up in the South, I used to believe there was a black dotted line dividing America. North of it was a vast wasteland of dirt and concrete, and South of it was paradise.
I got this from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. The first time we drove through Pennsylvania I was pleasantly surprised. I was 21.

Rinson Drei

I always believed that the White House was in Pennsylvania, because it sits on Pennsylvania Avenue. I didn't learn until recently (at an emberassing age I won't mention) that the capitol is in Maryland.

Heather

When I was growing up in a suburb of Boston Massachusetts I heard a commercial for the Herald Newspaper that ended with the line "Boston Moves to the Herald!" Well I didnt know what the Herald was, or even what a commercial was, so I figured that it meant they were moving the whole city and everyone was going to have to get up and move somewhere else in the state if they wanted to stay in Boston.

Soap

I used to believe that the earth looked like a globe - with all the lines and directional markers, country names and so forth. The first time I was up in a plane, I couldn't understand why I couldn't see them. When I asked my mom, she said that the lines were too far apart and we'd have to be in outer space to seee them.

Anon

I used to belive place names on maps were acutally printed onto huge fields. As I remember when me and the family, I was about 5 or so I think, were driving down to London from Birmingham. I was on the look out for 'LONDON' to be printed in big black letters on fields as we neared London. To my disappointment I could not see 'LONDON' printed on fields :-(

Rob

I used to believe that everyone in Russia (back when it was The USSR) had to write a letter to the president for permission to do anything. This also included writing a letter to the president asking for permission to do something, so I thought the president would come to the house of anyone who wrote him a letter and arrest them for writing a letter without permission.
I don't know how I thought anyone got anything done, I didn't think that far.

Duane

I used to think a drain pipe in my backyard led to another world.

Anon

I used to think that Alaska and Hawaii were just islands in two sqare lakes down by Mexico. I never understood why Alaska was so cold if it was down there. It wasn't until I was 8 or 9 and got a globe that I realized I was wrong.

Anon

I don't remember how old I was but I remember once my mom told me she and my step-dad had tickets to go see Chicago. I thought it was very odd that you needed a ticket to get into a big city. I imagined cars lined up at all the entrance points into the city to give a ticket to someone in a booth......kinda like the lines getting into the parking lots at Six Flags.

Jaycee

I used to believe that if you put your finger on a map next to your city or town, you could see your finger if you looked outside. But you had to be careful not to put it directly on your city, or you would squish yourself!

Blair

When I was very small my dad used to take me, on his bike, to this park/woods area, where we would walk along the only path there, and I remember being very confused we always ended up at the same point we started out at, where our bikes were parked, even though we always walked 'straight' and never turned back...I guess I didn't really get the 'curves-in-roads'-thing...

MM

Until i was corrected at a summer camp in the 7th grade, I thought that electricity was limited to certain cities (those I saw on TV) and the Dallas suburb that I grew up in. I then met some children from another suburb about 10 minutes away who informed me that they did indeed make regular use of both the telephone and the automobile

Youngnotold

I thought that Florida wasn't connected to the United States, like Hawaii. I never caught on that people drove there in their cars and when I did I just suspected that there was a really long bridge. I found out a couple of months ago that it is connected and I'm almost 15.

Lily

I was convinced that there was a city in The Netherlands called Hamsterdam and that was where hamsters came from.

G.B.

I thought that PB (pacific beach) in San Diego stood for peanut butter. I sure wondered why the banners advertising peanut butter everywhere had fish on them...

Aretia