The China/Russia relationship gets me, too. Because I think of Chinese people as “East Asians” and Russians as “Eastern Europeans,” it’s hard to remember that Russia stretches much farther east than China. I tend to think of China as nestled in the southeast corner of Russia, rather than lying wholly south of it.
I also tend to think of many Western states like Utah and Colorado being farther north than they are. I imagine Denver, Salt Lake City, and Sacramento being on roughly the same latitude as the New York-Philadelphia corridor, and it always surprises me to look at a map and see how far south they are.
This reminds me of another wrong image I have. I grew up in northeastern NY and I always think that when I cross the bridge into Vermont, I’m on an island. But while there are several islands in Lake Champlain, the part you drive through is not an island, it’s a peninsula. It just feels like an island because it’s cut off from the rest of the state by the Canadian border.
Have yo ever driven around Whitehall, New York? The view from the bridge is weird: We think of Lake Champlain as getting wider the further NORTH you go, yet at this stretch it’s actually a lot wider to the SOUTH (I think it’s called “South Bay.”) I remember crossing that little bridge and feeling like everything was bassackwards.
I have driven around Whitehall. But having the lake get wider to the south doesn’t seem unusual to me. I grew up in the very northernmost part of the state so I’m used to the lake getting wider as it goes south.
Part of it is that what most people think of as “Boston” is actually the Greater Boston Area. Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, Newton, Quincy, and Braintree are NOT BOSTON, as they will all tell you very vehemently if you make the mistake of assuming they are. (Brighton also used to be NOT BOSTON, but they caved. This is not spoken of in the open.) Street names repeat a lot, because the colonists were dismally uncreative in this respect. In order to get from home to my volunteer position, I travel away from Broadway in Somerville and cross Broadway in Cambridge, heading towards Broadway in Boston. All three of these roads are within a five mile span, as the crow flies, and all of them are completely unconnected.
The only nicely navigable part of the city is the Back Bay, which was entirely built on artificial landfill as a Victorian public works project. It starts at the edge of the Public Garden and runs west until about Massachusetts Avenue. Not only are many of the street names cut permanently into the curbs at the corners of the sidewalks, but the cross streets are all in alphabetical order.
When I was a child I had a wild mental image of my home state’s capital city, Sacramento. I remember I was glancing a U.S map but not good enough because I made this mental image of Sacramento being much situated much further north in California. Not only that, but also thought Sacramento was close to the Pacific Coast. So roughly the location of Eureka, California is where I had established Sacramento being as a kid and teen. Pretty close to the Oregon border to boot and far north from San Francisco.
Very erroneous, I later found out as I got much stronger in geography that Sacramento is not as far north as I had thought and not near the coast. The state’s capital is not very far from San Francisco, and not north but actually two hours max west of the city by the bay and in the central part of the state. Sacramento is still about five hours from the border with Oregon. On a side note San Francisco is the middle part of California’s coast, not very far north. There is the “real” northern California such as Crescent City, Eureka, Redding.
In regards to the United Kingdom, I was startled when looking at a map at age 20 and realizing how much smaller it is geographically than Sweden, Norway and Finland! I mean Britain was a world power up until less than a century ago, so it must be “big” I felt. I had also thought that northern English cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield would be much further north than they actually are. Again while north of London and Birmingham, those cities are still not the most northern of England’s cities, such as Newcastle Upon Tyne. And this is only England, if looking at Britain at it’s entirety, then those are middle cities.
I used to also feel Australia was very isolated from any other country in the world, while pretty far off, the land down under is not as isolated, being fairly close to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
I have to say I don’t hold these images anymore and I have managed to shake them off.
[ul][li] Or that driving east to west or west to east across Texas takes an entire day[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
So this country yokel type from New England, touring in Texas, gets chatting with a Texas cowboy type in a bar. The cowboy, thinking to impress the visitor with the usual everything-bigger-in-Texas stories, says: “Why, out on my ranch, I could jump in my car and drive from morning to night and not reach the far side of my land!” To which the visitor says: “Yeah, I know what that’s like. I had a car like that once!”
Made a mistake in my post, Sacramento is east, not west of San Francisco. I also was surprised how Far East Greece is in Europe, many Eastern European nations are much more west than Greece. In a geographic sense Greece is not Western Europe at all, and the likes of Czech Republic are not too “east” at all.
I only consider Virginia Southern in history and culture but not geography. I will never consider it geographically southern. Ditto Maryland and Delaware which are mid Atlantic states. I find it absurd that some see those as South.
I was startled to find Niger is bigger in geographic terms than Nigeria.
Shocked that San Jose and Oakland are bigger than San Francisco, which is more prominent than those two. I used to think SF had a
Population of a million or more, in fact is over 800,000. Never knew El Paso, TX was 19th largest US city. Thought it was a small town in far west Texas.
I always think Japan is much larger than it really is until I look at a map. Personally, I blame all those WWII documentaries that showed an out of scale Japan with GIANT black arrows growing out of it and consuming Asia and the Pacific.
As a kid I always pictured the Statue of Liberty being out in the ocean because of the “first thing the immigrants saw” thing. If that’s the first thing they saw they weren’t looking too hard.
I was stationed in Korea while in the US Army. I had no problem with weather, it was just like home in Kansas. They are on almost exactly the same line of longitude.
