# Your geographical misconceptions **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 30, 2020, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294 "2020-12-30T20:58:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![Dead\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Dead\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Cat)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2021, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/221 "2021-01-11T23:38:09Z")
Not sure if this will help, but the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are in alphabetical order north to south. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2021, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/222 "2021-01-11T23:47:53Z")
> [@kitap](#): > > We get this all the time. People struggling in because they flew into Phoenix - it’s generally cheaper - and assumed Tucson was 20 minutes down the road. More like 2 hours. Maricopa County has more land area than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. It’s unbelievably huge to an easterner. It’s by far the largest county to have a huge city at it’s core. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/223 "2021-01-12T00:20:16Z")
The city of Saint John, New Brunswick, spells out “Saint” to reduce travellers’ confusion with St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Doesn’t always work. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/224 "2021-01-12T00:25:21Z")
Another thing that I was late to the party on was renaming, like Burma becoming Myanmar, Peking becoming Beijing, and Bombay becoming Mumbai, to choose only high profile examples. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/225 "2021-01-12T02:55:28Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > > [@kitap](#): > > > > We get this all the time. People struggling in because they flew into Phoenix - it’s generally cheaper - and assumed Tucson was 20 minutes down the road. More like 2 hours. > > Maricopa County has more land area than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. It’s unbelievably huge to an easterner. It’s by far the largest county to have a huge city at it’s core. My wife attended college & law school in Tucson at the UofA in the late 70s. While there, she fell in with a couple of UK exchange students. After they’d been here a few months and done what weekend touring they could she asked them their impression of AZ & the West in general. She said that one fellow said with wide-eyed disbelief: > It’s vast; simply unbelievably eerily emptily vast. Of course the Brits pronounce “vast” sort of like an American would say “vaaaahhhst”; which totally makes the story sing. Vaaaaahhhst. Yup, that’s us. After hurricane Katrina I recall a thread taking FEMA to task. Several Europeans were particularly scathing. Somebody, I don’t think it was me, pointed out that Katrina had laid waste to an area larger than UK proper. Good luck rallying enough forces across the EU to rescue and house everyone in the UK all in the first week. It’s a big place able to have big, really big, problems. ---
**Author:** ![kitap](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b9e5f3/32.png) [@kitap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kitap)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/226 "2021-01-12T04:46:58Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > > [@kitap](#): > > > > We get this all the time. People struggling in because they flew into Phoenix - it’s generally cheaper - and assumed Tucson was 20 minutes down the road. More like 2 hours. > > Maricopa County has more land area than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. It’s unbelievably huge to an easterner. It’s by far the largest county to have a huge city at it’s core. Years ago I spent something like 20 minutes trying to explain to a prospective guest on the phone that visiting San Xavier del Bac then Tumacacori then having lunch across the border in Nogales, Mexico then driving via Patagonia over to Ramsey Canyon and back to Tucson by 4 PM is not doable. They kept saying that this would be doable because Arizona doesn’t look any bigger than Connecticut to them. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/227 "2021-01-12T05:12:05Z")
> [@WildaBeast](#): > > Years ago [snopes.com](http://snopes.com) published an article confirming that a picture of… something… if I remember correctly it was of an especially large alligator, that was making the rounds on social media was indeed real. Among other things, they stated that it was taken in “southern Georgia, near the South Carolina border.” Then people started emailing them to “correct” them, because near the South Carolina boarder must be northern Georgia, right? Nope. If you look at a map you can see Georgia is more west of South Carolina than south of it. In fact the northern border of Georgia borders North Carolina and Tennessee. Just to confuse the issue further, a good portion of South Carolina is actually farther north than a good portion of North Carolina. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/228 "2021-01-12T05:25:51Z")
Then there’s the t-shirt I got in Vienna: **NO KANGAROOS IN AUSTRIA** ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/229 "2021-01-12T06:23:41Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > My wife attended college & law school in Tucson at the UofA in the late 70s. Whaddaya know? I got my law degree from the U of A also. Only it was the University of Alberta, not Arizona. Somewhat similarly, I got my bachelor’s from U of T (Toronto, not Texas). My ex-wife used to have a lot of fun this way. She’d jokingly tell people that she got her bachelor’s from USC, and her master’s from UNC. After they were appropriately impressed, she would laugh, and later tell them that her bachelor’s came from the University of Southern Colorado (“USC,” in Pueblo), and her master’s from the University of Northern Colorado (“UNC,” in Greeley). ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 8:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/230 "2021-01-12T08:06:08Z")
One year we did the Great Transcontinental Road Trip that everyone should do once or twice in their life. Actually, it wasn’t even the complete transcontinental crossing, just most of the middle. Outskirts of Toronto to outskirts of Edmonton. Four days of solid driving, with two hotel stays (yes, we drove through the night one night). And we got to our destination at 11pm on the fourth day. I just looked at the distances. Toronto to Edmonton: ~3200 km. For European comparison, London to Istanbul is ~3000 km. 😀 Another fun comparison: the norther third of Ontario is a swamp twice the size of Ireland. ---
**Author:** ![Moris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moris/32/2846_2.png) [@Moris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moris)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/231 "2021-01-12T11:42:20Z")
That’s a great tip! Now if I can only memorize the order of their capitals… ---
**Author:** ![Dead\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Dead\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Cat)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/232 "2021-01-12T13:25:15Z")
Hmm, that’s a trickier one. Riga is the only capital without an “n”, and is capital of the only country without an “n” (Latvia). And if you take that out of the equation, the other two (Tallinn and Vilnius) are then in alphabetical order north to south. ---
**Author:** ![Mark\_Finn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@Mark\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mark_Finn)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/233 "2021-01-12T13:28:08Z")
A friend would impress people when he said he went to “MIT” - without mentioning that it was the “Montreal Institute of Technology” - a place where you went if you couldn’t get into university. My father “studied at Oxford” - he took a one-week course there while on leave from the Air Force during WW2. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/234 "2021-01-12T14:34:08Z")
> [@Spoons](#): > > My ex-wife used to have a lot of fun this way. She’d jokingly tell people that she got her bachelor’s from USC, and her master’s from UNC. After they were appropriately impressed, she would laugh, and later tell them that her bachelor’s came from the University of Southern Colorado (“USC,” in Pueblo), and her master’s from the University of Northern Colorado (“UNC,” in Greeley). I attended the University of Southern California. One of the famous USCs. I nearly committed a major _faux pax_ in my first few days in USAF when I encountered a _very_ senior officer who’d graduated from the University of South Carolina. Which I, being a hard-core West Coast person, had never even heard of. I managed to get my foot back out of my mouth just before he caught on. I think. > [@Mark\_Finn](#): > > A friend would impress people when he said he went to “MIT” - without mentioning that it was the “Montreal Institute of Technology” - a place where you went if you couldn’t get into university. Suburban St. Louis Missouri has a similar _faux_ MIT. **[Meramec Community College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Community_College%E2%80%93Meramec)** is commonly called “MIT” = “Meramec in town”. In US parlance a “community college” is a 2-year government-run school that takes all comers and sometimes even teaches them stuff before granting a 2-year “Associates” degree. The quality across the nation is … uneven. Which is not to condemn them all; I attended a good one for 3 semester’s worth of my undergrad. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/235 "2021-01-12T14:39:58Z")
Growing up on the east coast, west has always been inland for me. And this has caused me trouble for the last 20 years after moving to the Gulf Coast. I still think “West” when people talk about going inland or to the other coast even though it’s “East” now. ---
**Author:** ![TRC4941](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trc4941/32/6792_2.png) [@TRC4941](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TRC4941)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/236 "2021-01-12T15:15:30Z")
I just realized a few months ago that Malta is in Europe and very close to Italy. When I heard the name “Malta” I pictured a country in the far east! I still don’t know what’s going on with Holland, The Netherlands, Dutch, Danish, etc. I’ve tried to sort it out but am still confused. I live in Minnesota but sometimes picture Illinois underneath us, not Iowa. When I was a kid, I pictured Hawaii off the coast of Florida! ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/237 "2021-01-12T15:25:11Z")
> [@TRC4941](#): > > I still don’t know what’s going on with Holland, The Netherlands, Dutch, Danish, etc. I’ve tried to sort it out but am still confused. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/eE_IUPInEuc/maxresdefault.jpg "Holland vs the Netherlands") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc) This may help ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/238 "2021-01-12T16:21:58Z")
> [@Hypno-Toad](#): > > Growing up on the east coast, west has always been inland for me. And this has caused me trouble for the last 20 years after moving to the Gulf Coast. I still think “West” when people talk about going inland or to the other coast even though it’s “East” now. As somebody originally from SoCal I had sorta the opposite issue when I began living and flying along the US east coast The other funny thing living in Greater Miami now is that when I hear a neighbor talking about visiting the “West Coast” I automatically think they mean California, Oregon, or Washington states. Nope. They usually mean Naples, Sarasota, Tampa, etc. The _other_ West Coast. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/239 "2021-01-12T17:06:03Z")
I remember it because Poland and Lithuania used to be a commonwealth and share a monarch, so if you are aware of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Lithuania is the one that abuts Poland. (Along With that weird exclave of Kalingrad), therefore it’s southernmost.And Latvia is the next one northeast, and the Estonia is the one that is closest to Finland, with whom it shares a language family (Finno-Ugric), which the other two do not. Ok, that’s way more complicated than north to south they’re in alphabetical order, but if you happen to know about Poland and Lithuania’s historical closeness, that’s another point of reinforcement for your memory. ---
**Author:** ![SCAdian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scadian/32/3292_2.png) [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2021, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294/240 "2021-01-12T17:25:55Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > that weird exclave of Kalingrad The only part of Germany that Russia still controls. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294.md?page=11) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-geographical-misconceptions/929294.md?page=13)